The Finnish Girl

Secrets kill. Not just those you choose to keep from others, or even those that others guard from you. There remains those secrets that you so desparately hide from yourself. They all catch up with Lempi Makinen Lahti.



When Lempi’s teenage son Danny discovers her suicide, he seeks to solve the mysteries that defined her life and death. A pack of letters and clippings hidden in an old family trunk may be the only keys to understanding both his mother’s past and his own future.



"The Finnish Girl" is a richly told tapestry of interwoven characters—the family patriarch who emigrates from Finland to the United States to create his own future, a son who turns his back on his home as part of an ill-fated mission to Russia during the Depression, the elderly mother who faces deportation in an America driven by fear during the Red Scare, and the young Finnish girl who cares too much about the injustices she sees.



Decisions in one generation propel another on unexpected paths, until one family’s hopes for the American dream threaten to become its nightmare.



“Melancholic, brooding, and cut-to-the-bone incisive, this is a tale to remember.” – Publishers Weekly