Northtown Blitz (Raimo Jarvi Investigates, Book 2) by Robert White
Release date: July 1, 2020
Subgenre: Hardboiled, Noir
About Northtown Blitz:
Fresh from the success of his last case we find Raimo Jarvi
reaping the benefits of his new-found status as a private detective who
gets results. Bella Cinciarelli was the eldest of three of sisters, all
of them famous as high school beauties back in the day, and now one of
them is dead. The coroner ruled the death natural causes but Bella is
convinced her sister was murdered and she wants Raimo’s help to prove it
and bring the murderer to justice.The problems begin when Raimo
realises Bella’s main suspect is her brother-in-law, James delCorelli –
lawyer, businessman and county commissioner – a powerful man, a man with
powerful friends, and as Raimo soon discovers - not a man you want to
get on the wrong side of.
Excerpt:
Chapter 1
Raimo Jarvi’s mother once said she didn’t
understand why anyone would marry a Finn.
“All they do is drink,” she said. That was bizarre, he thought, because
she married one. He saw his father get drunk only once during his childhood and
that was when he was ten years old and his older brother Rikki had just pulled
him out of a burning tent that left his face scarred forever. On the other
hand, his mother was Harbor Irish, as people referred to “shanty” Irish back then.
Rikki, never the sentimentalist and always his mother’s favorite son, had a
different expression for it: “a bunch of
white trash drunks.”
On this cold December afternoon, he stood
among the Finnish dead in the Lutheran cemetery in Conneaut where all the Finns
in Northtown wound up eventually, whereas the Irish of his mother’s side laid
their own beloved to rest in St. Libby’s—more formally, St. Liberius of Ravenna
Cemetery.
A kind of irony there his mother never
appreciated in her contempt for the Finnish. The Italians and Irish had a long
history of grievances against one another when Northtown was settled. The
“Swedes” and Irish had all but abandoned the east side of town to the Italians
who’d come over—the men first, then the clans—to dig Northtown’s sewerage
system and settle “Swedetown” while the Irish wrinkled their noses in disgust
at the newcomers and their broods of slovenly dressed, black-haired children,
all the while maintaining their vise grip on the railroads and docks.
Raimo Jarvi wasn’t in much of a mood to
contemplate ancient race hatreds, however. St. John’s Cemetery extended between
Route 20 and Conneaut Creek and was bordered by parallel stands of birch trees.
Their stark white-and-black complemented with the light snowfall that had
erased all the greenery and destroyed the flowers.
The population seemed to grow half an acre
every time he visited. Brush hogs attached to riding mowers were kept busy in
summer clearing new land all the way back to Conneaut Creek, although the
memorial plaques would not have been visible from where he stood even if no
snow had fallen, every one flat and flush to the ground. Only the cone-shaped
flower holders remained visible to mark the graves of the dead and many of
those were blown askew by the relentless winds of Northern Ohio in winter.
Here
they all were, though, Raimo thought—the names
he remembered from growing up in the harbor:
the Korhonens, Koskis, Makis, Juholas, Niemenens, and the
Hämälänens. Raimo’s people on his
father’s side were West Finns, not East; farmers, not bourgeoisie—much less the
Swedish nobility some “easterners” liked to claim in their Ancestry-dot-com portraits. Being land poor, the Jarvis were
Fennicized in their native land by having their surname clipped from Jarvanueris to “Jarvanu” and doubly
disadvantaged in America like other non-English speaking immigrants who
suffered a similar anglicizing at Ellis Island—ergo, “Jarvi.” He’d once memorized all 67 Finn names of the Honored
Dead in WW II on the black granite memorial stone at Point Park.
Not
so many now, he thought. Families scattered like
leaves, blown in all directions.
Amazon | Paperback | Fahrenheit Press
About Robert White:
Robert White lives in Northeastern Ohio. Many of his stories and
novels feature private investigator Thomas Haftmann: Haftmann’s Rules (2011), Saraband for a Runaway (2013), Nocturne for Madness (2015), and Doggerel for Dead Whores (New Pulp, 2019). Thomas Haftmann, Private Eye (2017) is a collection of 15 stories. Raimo Jarvi, a new series
private eye, is featured in Northtown Eclipse (2018) and here in Northtown Blitz. His latest noir fiction is Dead Cat Bounce (Fahrenheit, 2019). In 2019, he was nominated for a Derringer for
“God’s Own Avenger” and “Inside Man” was selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories 2019.
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