This is the third book in the Anna Fekete series, but I read and enjoyed it as a stand-alone. Anna emigrated as a child from the former Yugoslavia to Finland where she is a policewoman. On her summer vacation back in Serbia, she ends up investigating her own purse-snatching and the murder of her policeman father 25 years previously. I was interested in the coverage of the deep rooted prejudice towards Romani (gypsies) and the refugees who live around the town of Kanizsa. There was information about the local culture and customs in Serbia, and references to the barriers between Hungarian and Serbian speaking people in the country. I'll be tempted to read future books in the series to keep in touch with Anna after her return to Finland. ( )

Kati Hiekkapelto’s third novel to feature Finnish-Hungarian policewoman Anna Fekete is another of the titles on this year’s Petrona Award shortlist; the announcement of which was just the impetus I needed to catch up with the series. And though I have enjoyed its two predecessors very much I think THE EXILED is in a whole different class. It is an outstanding read.

Though I have travelled a reasonable amount I was born and have lived all my life on a giant island with naturally stable borders and politics. A very long way from everywhere else on the planet. Which helps, I hope, explain why places with more fluid and volatile geography and political situations are both fascinating and alien-seeming to me. Keeping up with events in such places via the news can be difficult as there’s an ‘other-worldiness’ that adds distance from my own day-to-day experiences. What good fiction, such as THE EXILED, can offer that factual reporting often lacks is a way to humanise the situations and make them, paradoxically, more realistic.

In this novel Hiekkapelto sends her heroine ‘home’. Or at least to the place she was born. The town of Kanisza was a Hungarian community in Yugoslavia when Anna and her family fled it in the 1990’s. Her mother and brother have returned to the town which is now part of Serbia and where those residents who only speak Hungarian need translators to carry out official business. Throughout the book there is a heartfelt and credible exploration of what constitutes ‘home’ for Anna and people like her who feel like outsiders no matter where they go. But the exiled people of the book’s title are even more clearly homeless. Focus in this story is on two groups of dispossessed souls: the streams of refugees fleeing the Middle East into Europe and the Roma people who have never felt welcome irrespective of how long an association they’ve had with a location.

Our entry into these worlds is, not surprisingly, via a crime. Though at least initially it’s a much more minor one that genre fans might be used to as Anna’s handbag is stolen while she is out with friends one night. When she reports the theft to the local police she learns that the thief was a young Romani man. And that he died soon after taking her bag. When Anna realises that the police do not seem interested in investigating the death she investigates on her own and begins to unravel links to an event in her own family’s past. It’s a very layered and compelling story about small town life and the damage we can do when we try to cover up a mistake.

Taking the series away from the familiar surroundings and characters is something of a risk but Hiekkapelto has provided enough of the ‘known’ to keep series fans happy as Anna catches up with her surviving family members and even maintains an email connection to one of her Finnish colleagues. Seeing a different aspect of Anna’s story as she reconnects with old friends and exposes greater depth in her relationships with her mother and brother makes her a more interesting character than ever for me.

I enjoyed the audio narration of the book but should report that Julie Maisey makes no effort to sound anything other than English. I prefer this to poor attempts at accents (if you could even work out what accents would be appropriate for this setting and its people of multiple heritage lines) but some commenters have remarked that it doesn’t feel right to them. However you read it, I would urge you to track down Kati Hiekkapelto’s THE EXILED which is topical, thoughtful and totally compelling. As a bonus it could easily be read as a standalone novel if you haven’t yet read the two earlier books in the series.

Kati Hiekkapelto has brought alive a fantastic character in protagonist Anne Fekete. I love her single-minded, tunnel vision of herself - crime fighting police officer, workaholic, because if she is that person, she doesn't need to worry about a personal life and finding out who she really is. Only, in the case she finds herself embroiled when she takes a trip back 'home' she is forced to face up to some reality about her past. Full of twists and turns and a plethora of unreliable and corrupt characters it is impossible to know who is telling the truth, who is noble, who is not. I couldn't even attempt to second guess what was going to happen thus making this novel a real page turner.

Hiekkapelto has chosen a subject matter particularly prevalent at the moment to address in this novel, one of immigration. She uses a cross section of characters to voice the many, many opinions that can be heard far and wide about the issue and I felt she put down a very equal measure of a very real situation within her book. The use of well thought out imagery of the Balkans by the author helps to darken and lighten the tone of the story and with the writing as sharp as the character the plot moves along at a good steady pace. The balance of police investigation to Anna's private affairs was well proportioned and the author made me feel as if I got to know the inner workings of Anna's mind quite intimately, which helped me understand, as the reader, why she makes the decisions she does.

I particularly liked the relationship between Anna and her mother, complex and highly emotional although in an indirect why rather than direct way it helped to explain how Anna can force herself to be seemingly so emotionless towards anything or anyone other than work.

Although this is a fairly dark crime novel, it is written with a poetic feeling about it, with the descriptions about the Tisza, the mayfly hatching that makes the river blossom, the festival that all the inhabitants of the town are literally waiting for so they can celebrate. It is a bright light of hope, in a novel who's subject matter is really quite bleak.

If you enjoy a good cat and mouse hunt then you will enjoy the translated version of Kati Hiekkapelto's The Exiled. ( )

The Exiled – An Excellent Crime Thriller

The Exiled, proving why Kati Hiekkapelto is a brilliant writer and spearheading the Finnish invasion of English crime fiction as she is in top form again. The Exiled is the third in Heikkapelto’s Anna Fekete series that has been so popular in her native Finland, and for once there is no snow in this thriller, but plenty of twists turns as if on ice.

Anna Fekete has finally decided to take a holiday and get out of Finland and head ‘home’ to the Balkan village of her birth, Kaniza in Serbia on the Hungarian border. A chance to spend time with her mother, her recovering addict brother and see her best friend before heading back to Finland to be the crime fighting whizz that she has become.

While out at a local wine fair her handbag is stolen and Anna gives chase to the thief and a small girl whom seem to be in cahoots. When the thief is found dead on the banks of a local river, and the police do not seem interested in investigating, Anna is drawn in to the murder. As she begins to ask questions, the police seem even more distant, people want to place the blame on the Roma or the refugees trying to get in to the EU.

The more Anna investigates the more questions that are raised, and she must be prepared for whatever answers that come back. At the same time the murder of Anna’s father in 1988 seems to have links to the murder, and the more she wants to know the less people are willing to help her. She is sent anonymous notes threatening her if she does not give up her investigation. There is even an attempt to run her over, but this only makes Anna more determined to investigate what is going on.

Anna’s investigation brings her into confrontation with life on the border of the EU and to many refugees the ‘promised’ land, police corruption, the mafia and political corruption, human trafficking and how little people put a value on the life of others.

The Anna Fekete series gets better with every new book that Kati Hiekkapelto writes and once again proves that she is on top of her chosen genre. Her writing continues to be fresh and exciting, while at the same time subversive and it is the reason that her reputation continues to grow and garner new fans.

The Exiled is an excellent crime thriller that will enthral you with a brilliant story and characterisation that will leave you impressed, and wanting more. ( )

Anna Fekete's father was a policeman and after his murder her mother took their family to Finland which is why Anna lives in Finland, and is in part why she also joined the police force.

Her mother has returned to live in the Balkan village of Kanisza which is where Anna was born. Anna decides to go "home" to visit, to catch up with childhood and family friends. Her handbag is snatched at a local market and eventually the thief is found dead. Whele her handbag is found, her passport and credit card are missing.

The local police, including a former colleague of her father, seem very reluctant to investigate the death or to find the little girl who was with the thief. Anna's instincts tell her that there is something wrong and provoke her into undertaking her own investigation despite her mother's opposition. She makes a friend at the local police station and he helps her access files. The more she investigates the more she is convinced there is a cover-up happening. Anna feels the whole scenario has something to do with who she is.

Refugees and gypsies are flooding into Kanisza which is near the border of Hungary and Serbia, in what was once called Yugoslavia, hence the title of the book.

I did not find the book as unputdownable as the blurb suggested. In fact, just as in the first in the series, THE DEFENCELESS, I found the style strangely stilted, and Anna in particular a bit tunnel-visioned and naive. Nevertheless the story held my interestand was illuminating in terms of how people in this area are living. ( )