Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #190371 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-07
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Synopsis
When a young woman dies peacefully in her sleep, her husband sits distraught at her side. Returning to his job at the Finland CID, he finds that a murder inquiry is just beginning. A woman has been smothered with her pillow while she slept and, as the case unfolds, others will be found having met death in the same eerily quiet and bloodless way. It is a very tranquil, peaceful sort of death, in which the victims appear to have experienced neither fear nor pain. The young policeman, stricken with his own feelings of grief and loneliness, starts to feel an affinity with this humane killer. Meanwhile, the murderer's dysfunctional relationship with his own cracked personality spawns increasingly macabre behaviour. The juxtaposition of the plights of these two young men results in a story haunting and unsettling, a novel peopled with characters who share the anxiety of feeling misunderstood, even by themselves. Wagner's sharp, snappy style is flawless, and the tragedy of this crime story is resonantly poignant.

From the Publisher
Violence and gentleness are entwined in this haunting psychological thriller

About the Author
Jan Costin Wagner:
JAN COSTIN WAGNER was born in 1972 in Langen/Hesse near Frankfurt. After studying German language, literature and history at Frankfurt University, he went on to work as a journalist and freelance writer. He divides his time between Germany and Finland (the home country of his wife). Ice Moon is his second novel, and the first to be translated into English.

Customer Reviews

Jan Costin Wagner - Ice Moon
Kimmo Joentaa sits distraught by his bedside as his wife quietly passes away, victim of a long illness. After several days of mourning, despite the misgivings of his superiors (he is still visibly affected), Joentaa finally returns to work at Finland CID, and finds himself involved in a most eerie murder enquiry. A woman has been smothered in her sleep, and hers is not to be the first suspicious death by such chillingly tranquil and bloodless means. The young policeman, still riven with his own grief and new loneliness, finds a strange attraction in this case of quiet, gentle killing, and begins to feel a bizarre affinity for this killer. An affinity, he hopes, that will help Joentaa catch him.

Ice Moon, second novel from German Jan Costin Wagner (though set in Finland), is one of the most unusual I’ve read in a while. It consists of a split narrative – chapters from the policeman, chapters from the killer – which is a decidedly tricky conceit to pull off successfully, but Wagner certainly does it here. Some of the time spent in the mind of the bizarre killer is admittedly rather weird, but as a device Wagner uses these asides to crank up suspense far more effectively than many writers do – by tracking the killers movements, we see how close to police come to catching their man. There are several classic suspenseful “he’s behind you” (or rather, he’s right in front of you!) moments, though – and this hardly needs saying - Wagner obviously does these far more subtly and powerfully than as if they were some raucous pantomime vignette.

This is by no means a conventional kind of crime novel – there’s little aspect of “whodunnit” (we know perfectly well) – but what it is a suspenseful rumination on the nature of death. You’d think this would be pretty much usual fare for a crime novel, but not so: many crime novels tend to talk about death in a relatively off-hand way, tossing out clichés and platitudes left right and centre, but Ice Moon really seems to go right to the heart of the thing which makes a murder investigation: death, the act of someone dying. I can’t recall reading a crime novel that has come so close to looking at the actual mystery of dying before, and it’s a little unsettling to me (to think this isn’t done more often, I mean). It’s a very sensitive examination, an incredibly moving piece of work. The protagonist, Kimmo Joentaa, is superbly written and rendered, a marvellous character, and his reaction to his wife’s death is done powerfully and hauntingly.

Overall, it’s a sensitively written piece of literature, and a suspenseful and enjoyable crime novel. The symbolic nature of the final events (I can’t explain more for fear of spoiling) originally had me raising my eyebrows, before thinking, “actually, that’s a little bit brilliant”. Wagner is clearly a crime writer with a lot of talent, and a nice slice of ambition to go with it, ambition to perhaps do different things with the genre, which I tend to admire above all things. Once again, more please.