Genre: Mystery
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
Step into a world where secrets smoulder between the lines and truth hides behind the curtain.
A famous father’s death. A city of secrets. A son who won’t let go. A play that refuses to stay on the stage.
When Mikael—a half-Finnish New Zealander—returns to probe his father’s supposed suicide, nothing adds up.
With a reluctant new friend, sharp-tongued editor-translator Pekka Wall, and a local misfit at his side, the stunning Mikael slips into Finland’s eccentric underbelly.
In nightless hot Finnish summer, the light hides more than it reveals; silence is a blade; the past refuses burial. As layers of performance, paranoia, and betrayal peel back, the real challenge isn’t catching a killer—it’s facing the truth.
Darkly funny and emotionally charged, The Birthmark Murders blends satire with sorrow, theatre with obsession, and a distinctly Finnish atmosphere you’ll feel in your bones. It introduces new gay sleuths, Pekka Wall and Tuomas Ylivire, who make the genre crackle with wit—despite the rising body count.
Love smart mysteries with bite and heart? Start The Birthmark Murders now—grab your copy today.
The Review
It’s a testament to the author, Janus Lucky, that, even though I’d already read book three in this series (The Triumvirate Murders), nothing was spoiled in this book.
In this book we meet Pekka Wall, a reclusive Finnish book editor and translator who is living a peaceful life in a Cotswold village in England. Two things happen in short order that shake him up and take him out of his quiet retirement. First, there’s a late-night phone call from a young Finn who identifies himself as Tuomas and gets hung up on by an irate Pekka. Then, the next morning, he’s awoken by a yowling cat and an uninvited guest who’s the namesake of and a dead ringer for a long-dead friend of Wall’s, Mikael Långberg. Mikael was a brilliant theatrical director and died, his career in tatters, soon after a hugely successful production of “Cabaret.”
A suicide that Pekka discovered twenty-five years ago might not be a suicide, and a young half-Māori man from New Zealand is seeking the truth about his father. This is what draws Wall back to the Finland he fled, to the quiet college town where he meets old enemies and the red-headed Tuomas who called him late at night. Tuomas Ylivere, it turns out, is the son of one of Pekka’s closest friends from long ago – recently named the chief inspector of the local police. Tuomas met Pekka at a book fair when he was twelve years old, and has never forgotten him.
These are the ingredients of a fascinating murder mystery and character study, as Pekka Wall finds himself drawn back into the sadness of his past, and confused by the allure of the young would-be novelist. There are ugly secrets hidden under the bright summer sun of Finland. Janus Lucky, Finish-born New Zealander, offers sharp observations on Finnish character and customs, all the while delving into the darkness lurking beneath the surface of ordinary lives.
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.
