Sawdust, secrets and a body that won’t stay dead…
Heikki Nevalainen is the proud owner of a once successful sawmill, a mountain of debt and very few options to deal with either of them. An unexpected solution arrives in the form of local gangster Ismo Sippo. Dispose of Sippo’s dead wife, and the sawmill can keep running. Refuse, and Heikki loses everything. Horrified but desperate, Heikki agrees, loads Annaleena into his car and heads for the mill.
But Annaleena proves to be not quite as dead as expected.
As a Belgian buyer arrives to inspect the mill’s timber, Heikki scrambles to keep up appearances. But the situation is splintering fast, and even his own workers seem to be hatching plans of their own…
Deadlines loom, tempers fray and misunderstandings multiply, and as the interminable situation grows ever worse, Heikki discovers that keeping a sawmill running is hard enough without a half-dead body and potentially fatal complications…
Blending deadpan humour, escalating danger and absolute chaos, The Fresh Cut is Antti Tuomainen at his most audacious, as good intentions, bad decisions and a small Finnish town collide with explosive results.
I'm thrilled to be hosting the blog tour for The Fresh Cut by Antti Tuomainen today.. Many thanks to Orenda Books for my advance digital copy of the book and to Anne Cater from Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part in the tour.
Antti Tuomainen's reputation as "the funniest writer in Europe" is well deserved but while his plots are always gloriously chaotic, what really makes them so memorable are the characters he populates his books with. His protagonist is often a likeable everyman who is perhaps not enjoying the best run of luck and through little to no fault of their own, ends up in a wildly unpredictable, usually dangerous situation. However, while the broad set-up may be familiar, the storylines are anything but formulaic and as with all his previous darkly humorous novels, The Fresh Cut is laugh-out-loud funny and yet warmly compassionate and hopeful at its heart.
Heikki Nevalainen is a lonely widower whose wife died of cancer and whose daughter is away at university. It's perhaps no wonder then that he is desperate to hang on to the sawmill he inherited from his father, despite its mounting debts. With apparently few options left open to him, he felt he had no choice but to seek a loan from the local gangster, Ismo Sippo. At the start of The Fresh Cut, Sippo calls Heikki and demands his presence. Already feeling beholden to the loan shark, Nevalainen is horrified when he realises Sippo has murdered his wife, Annaleena and now expects the sawmill owner to dispose of the body. Heikki has no intention of carrying out the gruesome orders but with no obvious escape route, he transports the dead woman's body to his mill while he tries to think of a plan. It's here that life really begins to take an unexpected turn for our beleaguered hero though, when he hears a scream and discovers Annaleena is actually still alive.
Heikki is an honourable man and so offers her a safe place to hide out but Sippo hasn't finished yet; life isn't as blissful as the scented-bath loving gangster believed it would be following the apparent death of his wife. His girlfriend – the fourth best pole-vaulter in Finland, no less – is proving to be rather clingy… Believing Nevalainen has outlived his usefulness, and desperate to expedite his escape to the Mediterranean, he is ready to call in his loan.
The structure of The Fresh Cut is so perfectly plotted; each character has a vital role to play in the mayhem than ensues but while it is farcical, Antti Tuomainen never plays it for cheap laughs. There are high stakes here and life, love and livelihoods are at risk. Revenge is the order of the day for a few characters and the reader is at a distinct advantage as we know their plans meaning it's a joy to see how their lives become so unexpectedly entangled. Meanwhile, poor Heikki just wants to cement a deal with his Belgian visitor which may save the sawmill but why are his employees acting so suspiciously, and does Monsieur Dupont have business or romance at the forefront of his mind?
It would be remiss of me not to also mention David Hackston, whose translation ensures the wit and warmth of Antti Tuomainen's prose can be enjoyed by English readers too. With unfortunate, grisly accidents, confused identities and a well-meaning police officer who just wants to help but invariably makes things worse for somebody almost every time he appears, The Fresh Cut is Antti Tuomainen at his best and this is a relentlessly entertaining read from start to finish. I loved every word and highly recommend it.
The Fresh Cut is published by Orenda Books and can be ordered from their website, further purchasing links can be found here.
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Finnish author Antti Tuomainen was an award-winning copywriter when he made his literary debut in 2007 as a suspense author. In 2011, Tuomainen’s third novel, The Healer, was awarded the Clue Award for Best Finnish Crime Novel and was shortlisted for the Glass Key Award. In 2013, the Finnish press crowned Tuomainen the ‘King of Helsinki Noir’ when Dark as My Heart was published. With a piercing and evocative style, Tuomainen was one of the first to challenge the Scandinavian crime-genre formula, and his poignant, dark and hilarious The Man Who Died became an international bestseller, shortlisting for the Petrona and Last Laugh Awards. Palm Beach, Finland (2018) was an immense success, with The Times calling Tuomainen ‘the funniest writer in Europe’, and Little Siberia (2019) was shortlisted for the Capital Crime/Amazon Publishing Readers Awards, the Last Laugh Award and the CWA International Dagger, and won the Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel. It was released as a Netflix film in 2025. The Rabbit Factor, the first book in a trilogy that includes The Moose Paradox and The Beaver Theory, is now in production for the screen, starring Steve Carell. The Moose Paradox was a Literary Review and Guardian Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Last Laugh Award. The trilogy was followed in 2024 by The Burning Stones, which won the SpecSavers Last Laugh Award. In 2026, The Winter Job won the CWA Crime in Translation Dagger, while Tuomainen’s latest novel, The Fresh Cut, was named Best Finnish Crime Novel of the Year.
Antti Tuomainen lives in Helsinki.
About the Translator
David Hackston is a British translator of Finnish and Swedish literature and drama. Notable recent publications include Kati Hiekkapelto’s Anna Fekete series (published by Orenda Books), Petra Rautiainen’s Land of Snow and Ashes, Lida Turpeinen’s Beasts of the Sea, and all three novels by award-winning author Pajtim Statovci. He has also translated Antti Tuomainen’s The Mine, The Man Who Died, Palm Beach, Finland, Little Siberia, and The Rabbit Factor trilogy for Orenda Books. In 2007, he was awarded the Finnish State Prize for Translation.
David is also a professional countertenor and a founding member of the six-voice vocal ensemble The Vicentino Singers.
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