Cold Trail, the latest volume in the award-winning Finnish police procedural series to be translated into English, continues the no-nonsense, realistic, essentially human style established in the previous books in the series. (This one has a new translator, however – Kristian London, whose English version is nearly as flawless as Peter Ylitalo Leppa’s translations of the previous books.)

In Cold Trail, a man who has been serving a prison sentence for murdering his wife in a drunken argument is escorted by prison guards to his father’s funeral, after which he takes advantage of the guard’s inattention to slip away. As the police pursue the escaped convict, they begin to question whether he may have actually been falsely convicted.

While a team of detectives work on the case, Kari Takamaki’s son is knocked off his bike in a hit-and-run incident. Though police in another jurisdiction are supposedly dealing with the crime, Takamaki investigates on his own, knowing they aren’t putting much effort into it.

The story proceeds, alternating perspectives of the police team on the hunt and the escaped convict, who insists on his innocence and is bent on evening the score. It builds to a dramatic conclusion, but also ends on an intriguing note of ambiguity that left me thinking about the book after I had finished reading it.

In an era in which thrillers tend to involve heroes saving the world from terrorist plots or tormented cops who up against deranged serial killers with a florid taste in gruesome murder scenes, Sipila’s series offers refreshingly down-to-earth but thoroughly involving stories in which the criminals are not monsters and the cops are not gods. I particularly liked the way our understanding of the escaped criminal got more and more complicated as his flight proceeded.

I’m very pleased that Ice Cold Crime is publishing them in well-translated and affordable editions, and grateful to the publisher for providing me with a review copy. It took me a while to read it, though, because my husband grabbed it first. He liked it, too.