Genre: Mystery
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
A yellow sports car that won’t stop. One hit-and-run on an August road—and Helsinki’s winter is already overshadowed with murder.
At the President’s Independence Day gala, celebrated editor Pekka Wall and his much-younger partner, rising sci-fi star Tuomas Ylivire, are Finland’s most-watched queer couple—until a drunken whisper on live TV hints at bodies buried beneath the city’s polished veneer.
What follows is pure Scandi-noir: a sweltering castle reception turning sour, neoclassical facades and frozen harbours, a trail from luxury boardrooms to back-street bedsits.
As Pekka and Tuomas are pulled into a lethal game, a power “triumvirate” of media darlings and tech money treats murder, sex, and blackmail as business expenses—evidence laundered, reputations traded, desire weaponised, with whispers reaching the Kremlin’s door.
Love makes them brave. Fame makes them targets.
Darkly witty and unapologetically queer, The Triumvirate Murders is a razor-taut slice of Finnish noir where intimacy and power collide—delivering shocks, laughs, and tears, sometimes all at once.
Crave smart, addictive crime fiction with bite and heart? Start The Triumvirate Murders now—grab your copy today.
The Review
This is a really engaging and interesting murder mystery for a couple of reasons beyond the plot. The subtitle of the book, “Murder as a business expense” says all that I can reveal about the plot itself, and is spoken by a character in the book. Janus Lucky himself is Finnish-born but raised in New Zealand, which I suppose gives him a unique point of view. His New Zealand upbringing gives him a deeply informed, yet detached, understanding of modern Finnland and its history. This is extremely helpful for a non-Finnish reader (although I have been to Helsinki four times in my life, never for more than a day, as it used to be the only way to enter or exit the Soviet Union). The Finns are both familiar to an American reader, yet also distinctly different, based on both geography and political history.
Another curious feature of this book—the reason I purchased it—is that the central characters are a gay couple. They’re also celebrities, and the opening scenes take place at the annual Independence Day reception at the Presidential Palace. Pekka Wall is a fifty-something editor and writer of international renown; while his partner, Tuomas Ylivire, is the red-headed son of one of Wall’s oldest friends. Tuomas is himself a celebrity based on a science-fiction novel that has become a massive part of popular culture.
This is the third Pekka Wall book in a series that is planned to be six books in all. Pekka and Tuomas get caught up in (yet another) murder investigation because they are part of the elite circle of people most involved in the action. Tuomas’s father, Niilo Ylivire—known wonderfully as Baguette—is a police inspector in Helsinki. That provides the perfect entrée for a complicated and increasingly dark mystery with roots in a schoolboy pact.
The author maintains a narrative presence as he points out the Finnish aspects of his characters. In a land that remains under deep snow cover half of the year, and spends as much time in darkness as in light, personality is shaped by environment. Nonetheless, both Pekka and Tuomas are memorable characters, and also appealing, three-dimensional men whose love is palpable. Over and over in the course of the narrative we meet people who, for all their stoic taciturnity, open their hearts and arms to people in need. It’s a very appealing image of this Scandinavian nation bordered all along one side by a Russian province that was stolen from the Finns long ago.
I’m going to have to purchase the first two books in the series, “The Birthmark Murders,” and “Handful.”
Five stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
