Where Have All the Young Girls Gone

Description

A group of hate crimes, a conspiracy, or a coincidence? Investigator Maria Kallio searches for answers close to home in award-winning author Leena Lehtolainen's riveting thriller. After completing a dangerous mission training police officers in war-torn Afghanistan, Police Detective Maria Kallio returns to Finland as the head of a new special crimes unit. But what awaits her in her home country is her most challenging and unsettling case yet. Three immigrant Muslim girls, all members of the same social club, have gone missing under mysterious circumstances. When the body of a fourth girl is found in the snow, strangled with her own headscarf, the investigation takes on a grim new urgency. Is there a xenophobic serial killer on the loose? A random white nationalist? Or does something more insidious bind the girls? In a Finnish city struggling to assimilate a new population of Muslim immigrants, the answers are hard to come by... One thing is certain: it will take a detective familiar with the darkest depths of humanity to sift through the wreckage of clashing cultures in search of the truth. That detective is Maria Kallio.

Leena Lehtolainen was born in Vesanto, Finland, to parents who taught language and literature. At the age of ten, she began her first book-a young adult novel-and published it two years later, followed by a second book at the age of seventeen. The author of the long-running bestselling Maria Kallio Mystery series, which includes-most recently-Derailed and The Nightingale Murder, Leena has received numerous awards. Among them are the 1997 Vuoden Johtolanka (Clue) Award for the best Finnish crime novel and the 2000 Great Finnish Book Club prize. Her work has been published in twenty-nine languages. Besides writing, Leena enjoys classical singing, her beloved cats, and-her greatest passion-figure skating. Her nonfiction book about the sport, The Enchantment of Figure Skating, was chosen as the Sport Book of the Year 2011 in Finland, where Leena lives with her husband and two sons.