Today I’m joining the paperback blog tour for The Burning Stones. The new cover is brilliant and I’m resharing my review that I originally wrote in October 2024 with thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me on the tour and to Orenda Books for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

Saunas, love and a ladleful of murder…

A cold-blooded killer strikes at the hottest moment: the new head of a sauna-stove company is murdered … in the sauna. Who has turned up the temperature and burned him to death?

The evidence points in the direction of Anni Korpinen – top salesperson and the victim’s successor at Steam Devil.

And as if hitting middle-age, being in a marriage that has lost its purpose, and struggling with work weren’t enough, Anni realizes that she must be quicker than both the police and the murderer to uncover who is behind it all – before it’s too late…

From the international bestselling author of The Man Who Died and The Rabbit Factor, comes a darkly funny, delightfully tense new thriller that showcases humanity at its most bare – in middle age, suspected of murder and, of course, in a sauna…

Review:

I’ve read and enjoyed most of Antti Tuomainen’s novels now, but for me, The Burning Stones has a much darker feel to it. I liked this diversion from his previous work, although there are still the moments of humour we have come to expect from this author. It’s a relatively short novel, but he packs so much into it. From the prologue, he gets straight to the point and creates an atmosphere which is full of tension and I really wanted to know more about the victim and how he had come to his death.

The protagonist of The Burning Stones is Anni, a character that I found quite thoughtful and analytical, and I warmed to her quite quickly. However, as a first person narrator, there was always a flicker of doubt in my mind as to whether she was reliable or could, in fact, be the perpetrator. 

We also meet Anni’s colleagues, and they provide us with a fairly limited, but interesting, group of suspects. Antti Tuomainen does a great job of presenting them to us, so that as readers, we can try to work out what has happened.

Antti Tuomainen is a fantastic writer and I love the way he builds up a beautiful picture of the novel’s setting in Finland. I could picture everything that was happening in wonderful detail and this really helped me to lose myself in the story.
The plotting in The Burning Stones is really strong, and I loved the way the different elements of the story came together in a way I was not expecting. It is a novel which will stay in my memory for some time.

The Burning Stones is available from Amazon.

You can follow the rest of the blog tour here: