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Robert T. White
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Fahrenheit Press
ISBN-10: 1912526794
Type: Fiction
Pages: 272
Copyright: July 3, 2020
ISBN-13: 9781912526796
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
Raimo Jarvi, small-town private investigator, takes a case involving political corruption and murder.
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.
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