Dear friend of Arkadia,

Jim Thompson will come on Thursday 28.5 at 18:00 to talk about his new book Snow Angels, due to be published in Finland in September 2009. Jim will talk in English but will also gladly answer questions in Finnish if necessary. Welcome!

Warm regards,

Ian

 -        Entrance is free and green tea will be served (a 2€ donation for 

the tea is suggested and would be welcome!)

Snow Angels by Jim Thompson

 A small town in Finnish Lapland struggling through the endless night of Arctic winter. A gorgeous movie star slaughtered in a snowfield on a reindeer farm. A policeman’s teenage son found hanged. A woman burned to death on a frozen lake. Detective Kari Vaara has to come to grips with his past to solve the crimes of the present. The truth could tear him, his family and his community apart.

Snow Angels crossbreeds the American hardboiled detective genre, as characterized by writers James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard and the previous Jim Thompson with the modern Nordic detective novel style and is influenced by writers including Henning Mankell, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.

 Snow Angels is high-speed rocket-sleek fiction with depth and spirit. The novel looks beyond the international perception of Finland as a nation peopled by citizens happily manufacturing mobile phones and basking in sauna. Snow Angels explores beneath that veneer, exposing a country plagued by alcoholism, mental illness, violence and suicide.

Jim Thompson, an American, age forty-four, has lived in Helsinki, Finland, for eleven years. He has a Master’s degree in English Philology from The University of Helsinki, where he also studied Swedish and Finnish, in which he is fluent. He is married to Finnish sociologist and theatre instructor Annukka Öljymäki.

Thompson is a fulltime novelist, contracted to Johnny Kniga, an imprint of WSOY, Northern Europe’s largest publisher, for a series of political thrillers and crime stories, the first of which appeared in September 2008. Snow Angels is scheduled for publication in Finland in September 2009. In the past, Thompson has worked as a bartender, bouncer, construction worker, photographer, rare coin dealer and soldier.