Ice Moon

by Wagner, Jan Costin

• ISBN13: 9780151012695
• ISBN10: 0151012695
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-05-07
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

Only a week after losing his wife, a distraught Detective Kimmo Joentaa returns to work to join a murder inquiry. It is the case of a woman smothered in her sleepa curiously tranquil death, it seems, and one with no motiveand Kimmo becomes obsessed. The only clues are a half-empty bottle of red wine, two glasses, and a missing painting, a blurred landscape of no value. When a young man is found murdered in bed the next day in a hostel room with seven people asleep around him, Kimmo realizes a serial killer must be at work. As he struggles with the memory of his wifes early death, Kimmo investigates the murders and tries to understand the mind of the perpetrator, who appears to be quiet, self-effacing, and affablewhy then the urge to destroy? Set in Finland during the unnervingly long days of late summer near the top of the world, Ice Moon is an unsettling, poignant mystery.

Author Biography

JAN COSTIN WAGNER is a journalist and freelance writer. He divides his time between Germany and Finland, which is his wife’s home country.

Excerpts

1Kimmo Joentaa was alone with her when she went to sleep. He sat beside her bed in the darkened room, held her hand, and tried to feel her pulse. When he lost itwhen he also ceased to hear her breathing softly in and outhe held his own breath and bent over her without moving, so as to regain contact. He relaxed, slumping a little in his chair, when his fingers once more detected the faint throbbing beneath her skin. He kept looking at the clock because he thought it was over. Without wondering why, he had resolved to note the time of her death. The idea had occurred to him some days ago, while he was sitting on the bench outside her room, staring at the snow-white door beyond which she lay. Rintanen, the physician in charge, had taken him aside before going in to see her, armed with some powerful medication and an encouraging smile, and told him it could be over very soon. Any time now. He no longer left her. He took his meals beside her bed and spent the nights in a restless doze from which he awoke with a start every minute, afraid of not being with her during the final seconds of her life. His sleep was an entanglement of gray dreams. In the days preceding her death she began to tell stories he didnt understand. She told him about images she could see, about a red horse she was riding, and about her travels in the realms of her imagination. Speaking more to herself than to him, she gazed through his eyes into nothingness. Once she asked who he was and what she should call him. Kimmo, he said, and her lips mouthed the name. He stroked her hand, listened to her, smiled whenever she smiled, and forbade himself to weep in her presence. Once or twice she asked if he could see her riding the red horse, and he nodded. In response to his inquiry, Rintanen had explained that these hallucinations were side effects of the medication. She was in no pain, he said. Her death occurred at night, three days after Rintanen told him her condition had worsened. The room was dark. He could feel her hand and sense rather than see her eyes and lips. On the point of dozing off, he was jolted awake by a sudden fear that the interval between her breaths would never end. He did what he had often done: held his own breath, bent over her, and remained quite still. He waited for her faint, shallow breathing, for the throb of her feeble pulse against his fingers, but this time there was nothing. He began to stroke her arm, bending down still further until his cheek brushed her lips. Slowly, he caressed her chill face and rested his head on her lap. Then he sat up and looked at the clock. It was fourteen minutes past three, and she had gone to sleep. The thought of the moment of her death and of the minutes thereafter had often exercised his mind and haunted him, and he had striven to shake it off. Half consciously, he had believed, hoped, that her final breath would bring his own life to a standstill. He had sometimes envisioned that he would weep a

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Excerpted from Ice Moon by Jan Costin Wagner
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