The Bodyguard by Leena Lehtolainen

First published in Finland in 2009; published by AmazonCrossing on December 9, 2014

Finnish bodyguard Hilja Ilveskero threatens to resign in protest if her client buys a fur coat made of lynx (an animal with which she had a childhood affinity). The client quite properly responds by firing Hilja. Soon thereafter, the client is killed in Moscow and Hilja, back in Finland, spends the next couple of chapters telling the reader "I couldn't remember what happened that night" and "I wish I could remember what happened that night."

Unfortunately, Hilja can recall her childhood, the uncle who raised her, and their pet lynx. Hilja devotes countless pages to those memories, the lynx in particular. They act as a drag on a plot that would be slow-moving even without the flashbacks. Eventually she tells us about the defining moment in her childhood. It is predictable and trite, as is a plot that revolves around the missing hours in a life during which a murder was committed.

Later Hilja is hired by a politician and begins to unravel the mystery of her former client's death. The first reveal, an information dump from an interrogated character, is more tedious than surprising. The rest of the convoluted novel leads to a final reveal that is both dull and contrived.

Throughout the novel, Hilja tells us what's on the news and the content of her dreams and what she had for breakfast and many other things that are of absolutely no interest. I'm all for setting a scene and creating a realistic background but it's possible to do that in a way that engages the reader. Leena Lehtolainen hasn't learned that trick. Lehtolainen's writing style is serviceable but uninspired. Characters tend to be caricatures while descriptions are too dependent upon clichés. The implications of Finland's dependence on Russian energy is the novel's best theme but that isn't enough to carry a thriller.

Hilja spends a good bit of the book lusting after and fantasizing about and bedding a guy while worrying that he's trying to kill her. I've heard of desperate, but seriously? This leads to cheesy sentences like "Finally he read my mind, grabbed my shoulders, and pulled me to him, smelling like a man should. His lips were hungry, his tongue searching his way into my mouth." I'm still wondering what a man with a searching tongue is supposed to smell like -- Armani Gio or axle grease? By the end, The Bodyguard just smelled cheesy.

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