Lead Review
- Book: The Exiled (Anna Fekete)
- Location: Serbia
- Author: Kati Hiekkapelto
The Exiled in the third book in the Anna Fekete series. The first two, The Hummingbird and The Defenceless, are firmly set in Finland. The Exiled is equally firmly set in Serbia.
Anna is a detective with the Finnish police force. She returns home for the summer to visit her mother in Kanizsa, a town on the Serbian-Hungarian border. Kanizsa is where she was born and brought up. One bank of the River Tisza that flows alongside the town is in Serbia, the other bank is in Hungary. Her family is part of a Hungarian speaking minority, they are not ethnic Serbian.
On her first evening home Anna is drinking at a café in town with some friends when her handbag is stolen. The thief runs off – and ends up (later) dead by the banks of the river. The local police say simply that he drowned. Anna investigates and finds that all is not as it seems… Her investigations lead her into both the local Roma community, and also into the camps of refugees fleeing across Europe and waiting to cross the border into Hungary – a far from easy task without the necessary papers. The police are of no help at all – and, indeed, seek to frustrate her activities. She is pretty certain there is a cover up, but why?
She also hears stories of her father’s death years earlier. He was allegedly shot by a Roma while investigating a mafia crime in a remote farmhouse, but the accused had an alibi which the authorities chose to ignore at the time. She wants to know what actually happened to him and who killed him – but, again (a bit like the current investigation) she is confronted by a wall of silence. Could there possibly across the years be some sort of connection between the two crimes?
The Exiled is a dramatic and well worked thriller but, as ever with Kati’s books, it carries a message of social conscience. The good people of Kanizsa look down on the Roma, who live amongst them but who have no hope of successful local employment and whose men go off begging around Europe – thus reinforcing the stereotype of them being nothing but wasters. Similarly, they despise the refugees whom they call migrants – the preferred term of the Hungarian media. They are not at all seen as fellow human beings fleeing war and destitution in their homelands. This is sadly not a story of everyone getting along together…
It is, though, an exciting and thought provoking read.
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