Spooky a nd mysterious. Could be read as a stand alone but still felt like I was missing some back stories.

I jumped into this series with this book, accidentally. I had no knowledge that there were three books before this one, and while the mystery was a standalone, there were so many small references to past books, I felt like I was missing a huge part of understanding Jessica Niemi, the detective protagonist.

Jessica has been put on administrative leave after a video of an altercation goes viral. She ends up on a small island in the sea between Finland and Sweden with a dark past, including mysterious drownings and an eerie apparition of a young WWII orphan. When another death occurs shortly after Jessica's arrival, she must battle her own ghosts to solve the crime.

I would recommend for readers of the series who will want to see the development in Jessica's character, but for readers like me, I'd say to start with the first book instead.

"**Ghost Island**" by Max Seeck is a thrilling and atmospheric page-turner that expertly weaves suspense and supernatural elements into a gripping narrative. Seeck’s masterful storytelling and intricate plot make this novel an exhilarating and unforgettable read.

Loved the setting - a remote island -
Loved the characters - Jessica becomes involved with three WWII survivors and a ghost - really great and suspenseful

Ughhhhhh oh my gosh this was depressing AF.

It was a page turner, I read this one in a weekend (a little on Monday tbh,,,), so it was fast, but it's also Nordic Noir and super slow. The MC was unreliable AND unlikeable, I guess if I read the whole series I would understand her more, but reading just this one? Yeah I don't feel empathy for her. And there's a freaking surprise pregnancy.

So it's really just a no for me.

P.S. trigger warnings galore.

From the very start of the novel, Max Seeck has created an intriguing mystery within Ghost Island, a mystery that will keep readers riveted as they sift through red herrings and follow along with Jessica as she hunts for the answers to stop the murders. I loved Jessica as a character, most of all because she isn’t perfect, grappling with her past and her own difficulties that leave her floundering at times. But that lack of perfection creates a character that readers care about and root for, as Jessica holds the narrative and keeps the reader concentrating on the mystery.
I loved the noir feel of the novel and the present tense. It isn’t typical but it helps keep your attention on the story and makes you feel very present in the novel. I also like how the narrative shifts from Jessica to other characters, giving the readers insight into the past and into the darkness of the past. The narrative shift is used brilliantly to help shine a light on the mystery and who the killer might be.
If you like noir style mysteries with a complicated female detective, this novel is for you. The characters are fascinating with an intriguing mystery and a riveting story. The intrigue unfolds bit by bit and the ending is fascinating.

Thank you @berkleypub for this gifted copy!
Once again we join the complicated Detective Jessica Neimi as she solves a decades old mystery and series of crimes. Sent away on mandatory vacation after a video is posted of her “attacking” a man in the street (he deserved it y’all), Jessica goes to what she thought would be the middle of no where to stay out of trouble. But things are not as they appear.

This book has a dark history, ghosts, serial killer, and next level clues that will lead any thriller lover down the obscure path of discovery. I love the character of Jessica, she’s so brutally herself in all her complicated, brusque, emotional glory and I thoroughly enjoy her thought processes as she investigates. As always the story is multilayered, the scenes vibrant and moody, and the endings satisfying. I was kept guessing throughout and honestly had settled on a totally different killer!

I appreciated the emphasis on supporting adoption and fostering of children by using the tragedy of the children sent away for safety, whose parents then died during WWII. Those children then needed homes and it was difficult to support and remains today a culture concept that in the surface everyone seemingly supports, but in reality is made very complicated and not always appropriately governed. I hope this amazing addition to this series draws readers to seek out more information on this current issue and its history.

This was a dark installment in the Jessica Niemi series. Jessica is in a dark head space and for three-quarters of the book, you are not sure if she will make it through to the end. I liked the ending, both for Jessica and Maija.
Maija's ending was bittersweet, I was truly hoping that she would pop-up somewhere and have a family and lived a long-life but this ending was more fitting.

Ghost Island by Max Seeck is the fourth in the Detective Jessica Niemi series.

First, let me thank NetGalley, the publisher Berkley Publishing (and in particular Kaila Mundell-Hill for sending me a widget),  and of course the author, for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.


Series Background:    (Warning – Contains spoilers from previous books) Detective Jessica Jessica Niemi has suffered a lot of loss in her life.  She was the only survivor of a car crash when she was six, where her parents and brother died.  Her mother was responsible. Then she lost her foster parents.  Jessica works for the Helsinki Violent Crimes Unit of the Police Department. Recently her boss/mentor and father figure, Erne Mikson, passed away from cancer.  She is still having nightmares and hallucinations about her mother.   Jessica is a very private person, and until recently, only Erne was aware of how wealthy she really is.   She and her new boss - Helena Lappi - have recently come to an uneasy "agreement", to keep part of Jessica's past secret.   The rest of her team includes Yusuf Pepple, Rasmus Susikoski,  and Nina Ruska.  



My Synopsis:    (No major reveals, but if concerned, skip to My Opinions):
Jessica is on a forced vacation after assaulting a man.  Although she was defending herself, it made some unflattering headlines.   So she is on a remote island, and renting a room at a small inn.  She had been seeing a psychiatrist to help with both her emotions, and her fears of following in her mother's illness.  Her hallucinations are reminiscent of her mother's schizophrenia.  Jessica is just trying to find peace, and hopes this remote location will help.

But peace cannot be found on this island, which  has a history.  A children's home, now closed for many years,  once housed orphans from WWII, and has been at the forefront of a few strange deaths over the years.  Every year the remaining "children" of the home, all now quite elderly, return to the island for a reunion.  This year, there are only three remaining.  When of them dies, in the exact spot as others,  the legend of Maije, a girl in a blue coat, resurfaces.   But Maijje has been gone for many years.

The policeman investigating the crime wants no help from Jessica, but she is, of course, going to look into it anyway.  Unfortunately, Jessica's own problems are stopping her from seeing the truth from the fiction.



My Opinions:
I usually complain that the books in this series seem long, but that is not the case with this one.  Although it was almost 400 pages, it seemed to go very fast.  

The plot was really good, the characters well-developed.  I like how the author told the story in multiple time-lines, so that we had an idea of the struggles Maije endured.

I definitely recommend that these books be read in order, as it will be the only way you will understand where Jessica comes from, and understand some of her actions.  Sometimes I think she has a God complex....I don't know how many times she thought "I should call the police", and didn't.  She never seems to need/want any help.  I would like to see her and Yusuf get together, but now that Jessica has another issue to deal with, she will probably want to handle it on her own.

I have learned to disregard the unfamiliar names in this series.  This is just what happens when a Canadian reads Nordic crime.

Overall, it was a rather sad and emotional read.  It dealt with abuse and bullying, as well as obsession and murder.  Then there was the mental illness angle.  It also dealt with family, and loneliness.  The children and their carers at that orphanage just got to me. It was quite haunting.

I will definitely be watching for the next one.

**4.5-stars**

Ghost Island is the 4th-installment in Max Seeck's Jessica Niemi series, also known as the Ghosts of the Past series. These Nordic Crime novels follow MC, Jessica Niemi, who is a Helsinki Police Detective. Admittedly, this is the first novel that I have picked up in this series, and personally, I feel it worked well as a standalone.

With this being said though, I enjoyed it so much that I intend to go back and read the previous 3-books. I've already got the 1st-book, [book:The Witch Hunter|52322799], on loan from my library and am excited to start it soon. I found Jessica to be a very compelling protagonist, and she did refer to some things in her past that I am interested in learning more about. Most specifically, her relationship with an apparent mentor who has since passed away.

In this installment, at the very beginning of the story, Jessica gets in a bit of trouble while leaving a therapy appointment. She gets in an altercation with a belligerent man, who goes so far as to put his hands on her. Defending herself, Jessica fights back, although in hindsight, she may have taken it a little too far. When video of the incident spreads, Jessica's supervisor suggests she take some leave to get her head on straight. The Department doesn't need this type of negative publicity.

Jessica travels to a remote island in the Åland archipelago, where she rents a room at a historic seaside inn. She doesn't tell anyone in her life where she is going. Hoping for solitude, Jessica is a bit rattled when a group of elderly travelers arrive, one of them begrudged that Jessica is inhabiting the room she usually stays in. Jessica learns this group is the last of the 'birds of spring’, former refugees who fled Finland as children during World War II and lived together for a few months in an orphanage on the island. They return every year, for a reunion of sorts.

The orphanage has been abandoned for years, but the building still exists and local legend has it that one of the orphans, a girl named Maija, who went missing decades before, still haunts the island. Maija is said to appear, in her signature blue coat, late at night at the end the pier, the last place she was ever seen.

When one of the ‘birds of spring’ is found dead, drowned by the pier, Jessica suspects foul play. She begins to dig into the past of the orphanage and discovers two other deaths that suggest a copycat killer may be on the island. With inclement weather closing in, making travel an impossibility, Jessica must get to the bottom of this and quickly, before more people end up dead.

I wasn't sure what to expect going into this. As mentioned, I hadn't read the other books and wasn't sure if that would damper my enjoyment or not. Nevertheless, this synopsis was intriguing enough for me to want to take the risk and I'm so glad that I did. I was invested in this very early on, as I found Jessica's character extremely compelling.

I was surprised that this turned out to be a dual timeline, with us getting a huge chunk of the story told via Maija's perspective, set in the mid-1940s, at the time when she resided at the orphanage. I am not a big Historical Fiction Reader, but it seemed well done here. Maija's perspective did manage to keep me engaged and wanting to discover the connections to the present and Jessica's stay at the property.

This brings me to the setting. I loved it. As someone who lives on a small island, that is remote and difficult to get to, I love island-set stories. It makes it so easy for me to picture just the overall feel of that landscape. This was made infinitely better by the inclement weather that descends just as the plot is heating up. It brought a claustrophobic feel, as you realize that there is literally no escape for these characters. Someone is dead, and they are stuck. There's a killer amongst them, but who?

I am an atmosphere girl, first and foremost, and this transported me. I felt like I was there alongside Jessica. I could feel the cold, the wind, the isolation. It was gripping. My only slight criticism would be, once we got to the big reveal, I felt like the end dragged on a little two long for my tastes. Perhaps, if I had read the earlier books and had more backstory on Jessica I wouldn't have felt that way, IDK.

Either way, I cannot wait to read the other books in this series and I hope there are more coming. Jessica definitely has a lot of room to grow as character. I feel like there are big things ahead for her. Thank you to the publisher, Berkley, for providing me a copy to read and review. You've hooked me. I'm looking forward to more Jessica Niemi!

This is the fourth in the Scandinavian Noir series, "Ghosts of the Past." I have read the others but nonetheless found the references to past books disorienting and the short, choppy chapters that jumped from one location and time-frame to another equally confusing. While that would detract from the experience of reading most books, in this case the resulting disequilibrium felt right. Jessica Niemi, the Swedish investigator around whom this book (and the series) is centered, inherited not only unimaginable wealth but also schizophrenia from the women in her family. Indeed, the book begins with Jessica hallucinating during a session with her psychiatrist and then becoming involved in a brawl. The sense of distorted reality plays out in both her behavior and in the ghostly happenings on the remote Finnish island to which she has retreated, keeping the reader off balance but highly engaged in the plot.

When Jessica is given the choice to disappear for a while or be fired and consequently ends up at a nearly deserted island resort during the off-season, the ability to disappear into both literal and figurative mist begins to help her reflect upon her situation. As she explores the small island, she discovers a long-abandoned building which turns out to be an orphanage where WWII war orphans spent time before finding homes. One of those children never found a home, but instead disappeared after spending night after night waiting at the end of a dock in her blue coat. Sightings of the girl in the blue coat have taken place over the years, and there have been several drownings that seem somehow related. While Jessica is on the island, a storm blows in at the same time that a guest at the resort drowns and another insists that the girl in the blue coat was at the end of the dock.

Jessica investigates, in spite of the presence on the island of a local detective, and the plot moves back and forth in time as twists and turns mount up. Jessica deals with personal devils and challenges at the same time that she deals with shifting explanations for the seemingly inexplicable events taking place on the island. She makes uncharacteristic mistakes in interpretation because of her illness and also as a result of the other characters' residual effects of mental illness brought about by the treatment of the orphans decades earlier. There is much for both Jessica and the reader to reflect upon regarding various aspects of mental illness in this book.

Seeck does an amazing job of structuring the book to reflect that illness, but also transports the reader to the isolated island setting. Once the storm hits, it's virtually impossible to put the book down. The swirling winds mirror the twisting plot as the wild wind and lashing rain accompany the fast-paced conclusions to both the mystery of what happened to the girl with blue coat in the 1940s and what happened to those who have drowned just off the island in the intervening years. Although those resolutions are clear, Jessica's personal life, while more settled than when she arrived on the island, remains open enough to make the reader long for the next book in the series.

A ghostly tale is book 4 in the Jessica Niemi series. Jessica investigates a drowning that is tied closely to a ghost legend. This book was pretty fascinating. Jessica learns about the “birds of spring” the adults who were once children that left Finland during World War II and ended up in an orphanage other. They reunite every year but ghosts and legends haunt them. I would love to see this as a tv series.
Thank you @berkleypub and @netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

4.5 rounded up to 5

This was my first time reading Nordic Noir, and let me just say I loved it!  I can't believe I haven't read any before!  This is the 4th book in the author's Jessica Niemi series but the 1st one I've read.  I do plan on going back and reading the others. 

Jessica Niemi is a homicide detective with the Helenski Police Department, and after a physical altercation with a stranger makes headlines, she is put on leave.  In order to get away from scrutiny, she books a trip to a remote island.  It seems like the perfect getaway, but this island has secrets of its own.  The island was home to an orphanage, and in the mid-40s, it housed refugee children who fled Finland during World War II.  They call themselves "the birds of spring" and still gather on the island every year.  The orphanage no longer exists, but there is a local legend about a girl named Maija who still haunts the island.  Maija used to stand on the end of the pier every night in her blue coat until one night she vanished without a trace.  Some say they can still see her standing there at night.  When one of "birds of spring" is found dead near the pier, and Jessica finds out there have been other deaths connected to the orphanage, she knows she needs to investigate.  She's dealing with her own issues with her dark past, but can she put them aside to get to the bottom of the deaths?  Is it really the ghost of Maija, or is it someone staying in the inn?  Will Jessica be able to discover enough evidence to stop the murders?

Told in dual timelines and multiple POVs, this was a dark, gritty, atomspheric read.  I absolutely loved the setting, and the author really transported me to the secluded island off the Finnish coast.  The mystery was definitely intriguing and kept me guessing until the very end.  I also really liked Jessica and can't wait to read more of her story.  I enjoyed this book so much and would highly recommend it.

My only issue with Max Seeck’s books is that I never want them to end! On one hand I want to take my time and savor the reading experience. On the other, curiosity and impatience always get the best of me. Every single book in the series has been a 24 hour read for me!

Ghost Island is the 4th book in Jessica Noemi series. I’ll keep saying it - this one series you will want to read in order. Each one is dark and atmospheric and really dwells deep into Jessica’s history and personality. Ghost Island read even darker than previous 3 and I loved every second of it.

This book finds Jessica even more removed and isolated than normal. After experiencing a very public outburst she is placed on leave and forced to take some time off. She ends up on a remote island that used to house an orphanage that has a ghost story tied to it. Of course there’s a murder and of course Jessica wouldn’t be Jessica if she didn’t end up trying to get to the truth.

Though each book also lets us get to know Jessica’s colleague, this one had most of spotlight on her. And it made complete sense! I did wish for more Yusuf time - he’s one of my favorite characters and their dynamic is great! The setting was cold and isolated and rhetorical orphanage historical timeline made me so sad. I love Seeck’s and inclusion of philosophy and his mentions of the original queen of locked room mystery, Agatha Christie. If you appreciate attention to detail, beautiful writing in addition to the mind puzzle that is the main case, you will certainly enjoy this book!

Helsinki Police Violent Crimes Unit Detective Jessica Niemi is feeling more out of sorts than usual. Since the death of her mentor, she’s started to feel less in control of the schizophrenic hallucinations that have been her subconscious mind’s way of signaling that she’s overlooked something: a disconcerting if surprisingly helpful trait in an investigator. She’s finally in regular contact with a therapist, who’s been prescribing medications, but her mind and body both feel disoriented enough that even her boss Hellu Lappi has noticed:

QUOTE
“When we last talked about this, in December, I asked if you had difficulty distinguishing what’s real from what isn’t.”

“And I answered that I don’t.”

“But you have these–”

“Hallucinations? Visions? Sometimes,” Jessica says, despite knowing things were clearly better a couple months ago than they are now. Something truly has changed. It’s been a long time since she’s seen her dead mother, who has followed Jessica her entire life. But something else has appeared in her place. The craziness–that’s what Jessica herself calls it–has, unexpectedly and for the first time, arrived in completely uncontrollable form. This is exactly what Jessica has always feared most: that the delusions would become unpredictable; that they would turn against her, pull out the foundations of her entire world.
END QUOTE

So when a man accosts her after one of her therapy sessions and she loses her temper, with the subsequent violent altercation filmed by a bystander, she doesn’t protest too much when Hellu strongly recommends that Jessica take a vacation. Between that and an awkward confrontation with her best friend and co-worker Yusuf Pepple, Jessica decides to take off for a remote island off the Finnish coast, where she’ll hopefully be far enough away from any trouble, public or otherwise.

At first, a month’s stay at the bucolic boarding house on the island of Smorregard seems like the perfect cure for her nerves. But the arrival of an elderly trio known locally as the Birds of Spring changes everything.

Decades ago, the Birds of Spring had been part of a contingent of children housed in an orphanage on the other side of the small island. Having been relocated for their own safety to Sweden during the Second World War, they were sent back to Finland after the cessation of hostilities. Unfortunately, the ship their parents were traveling on was wrecked in a violent storm. Newly orphaned, they were kept on Smorregard till other arrangements could be made for their care.

Once older, the surviving orphans would meet annually on Smorregard to commemorate their past. By 2020, their number had dwindled to only three, none of whom seem particularly thrilled to have other visitors at the boarding house when they arrive. Jessica is happy enough to leave them alone to their reminiscing, until she wakes up one morning and learns that someone has been murdered.

Ordinarily, Jessica would try her best to leave the detecting to the local authorities. But she’s started having visions of a young girl in a blue coat, a figure remarkably similar to one in an old ghost story that originates from the time when the Birds of Spring first came to the island. Maija had been a strange child who disappeared from their orphanage one evening. Her ghost is said to haunt the dock and lure the guilty to their dooms. Is that what happened again with this latest death, or is something far more mortal and sinister afoot?

Jessica is uniquely equipped to uncover the truth, and it’s a delight to see her back in the investigative spotlight after she took something of a backseat in the prior novel in this series, <a href=”https://www.criminalelement.com/book-review-the-last-grudge-by-max-seeck/”>The Last Grudge</a>. The twists in her personal life are also huge, and will likely delight more series fans than just me.

But the real emotional heart of this novel is the young girl labeled both crazy and unloveable (a trait that unsurprisingly draws Jessica to her story,) whose pain serves as the catalyst for a terrible series of murders. Maija is shy and self-conscious, but also knows that she was once deeply loved:

QUOTE
So much emotion fits on the yellowed sheets. Her father sent the first [letters] from Kakskerta, but later he wrote from the army and the front. Some include the place next to her father’s signature; others read <i>Somewhere in the world.</i> The letters are saturated with love, sweat, and tears. Sometimes her father’s hand is steady, but Maija thinks she can also spot the moments when her father was scared; her father never mentioned his fear to Maija, not a single time. His fear that they might never see each other again. But after reading the letters over and over, Maija understands her father wanted to protect her from the horrific truth.
END QUOTE

A moving meditation on parental love and the use of philosophy in dealing with pain, Ghost Island is another terrific installment in the Jessica Niemi series. I can’t wait to read the next one, not only because of where it might take our heroine moving forward, but also because these novels are some of the best examples of Scandinoir out on the market today.

I really enjoyed this police procedural, dark, eerie, atmospheric island thriller. I initially did not realize this one was a series. However, It seems that it can be read as a standalone. I did get the sense that there were existing relationships with our main character Jessica I missed the history of, but the plot is separate. I definitely will be going back to read the previous books to learn more about Jessica!

The eerie feeling of the secluded island and the legend of the orphan girl in the blue coat, Maiji and the old orphanage was so intriguing. I also enjoyed Jessica’s character and relationships as well following her to figure out what happened on the island with the body that was discovered. I also love when mysteries go back and forth in timelines, and this one was great alongside Jessica’s visions! There were a lot of characters that I sometimes had to keep up and decide if they were reliable or not. I was suspicious of everyone!

Jessica is a homicide detective, just trying to get her life back on track. There seems to be a lot of trauma in her past (and because I have not read the other books, I am a little lost here). As she takes a bit of a forced vacation, to get herself back under control, following an incident while leaving the therapist, she finds a new mystery to solve.

What happened all those years ago, and where did little Maija end up? This question, and the death of one of the "Bird of Spring" will leave her grasping for the answers.

A delightful, can't trust anyone at all, read. I really need to find the other books and read, and then read this one again. There are references to incidents that assumes the reader has read all the other books, which can leave some gaps that are hard to fill.

Ghost Island by Max Seeck
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This is the fourth book in Detective Jessica Niemi’s series. This can be read as a standalone. (Which is what I did)

In Ghost Island Jessica is taking a bit of a vacation. When a person is found drowned, it unearths a decades long mystery involving a young girl in a blue coat.
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What I liked:
-I loved how gritty Jessica was. She was unapologetically herself, flaws and all.
-The mystery part of the story was engrossing. I was having a hard time trying to guess what was going on, which led to me flipping the pages faster and faster.
-I did not read the previous books, and while I got a good handle on the story and the characters, I do feel like this would have been EVEN BETTER if I had read the series in order.
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4⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I loved the vibes that this island gave, I loved Jessica’s character, and the entire mystery.
Posted to instagram 2/26/24

Ghost Island, by Max Seeck, is the fourth installment in the author's Jessica Niemi series. Or, as certain outlets are calling it, A Ghost of the Past novel. This story alternates between the year 2020, and the year 1946. Helsinki Violent Crimes Detective Sergeant Jessica Niemi is haunted by her dark past and the scars left by a coven of witches that nearly destroyed her. Jessica has faced not only a murderous cult but also human trafficking and the assassination of a government official.

Even though she is one of the lead Detectives in her unit, and has the record to back up her experience, she is having issues with dissociating what is real, and what is not. After a violent altercation between her and a belligerent man makes headlines, her boss Helena Lappi, who despises Jessica, orders her to take off until an investigation can be completed to see if Jessica's actions were warranted or not. To escape the unwanted scrutiny, Jessica travels to a remote island in the Åland archipelago and rents a room at a small seaside inn.

She is hoping to be left alone as she faces the possibility that she is losing what is left of her sanity and likely her job as well as something she never expected. When three elderly visitors arrive at the inn for their yearly sojourn, Jessica learns that they are the remaining ‘birds of spring’, former refugees who fled Finland as children during World War II and lived together for a few months in an orphanage on the island. The orphanage no longer exists but the local legend about one of its inhabitants, a girl named Maija, still haunts the surviving orphans.

Every evening Maija would put on her blue coat and stand on the pier, looking out at the dark water hoping that her father would come and bring her home. The parents never arrived because their ship sank. Then one night, she disappeared and was never seen again. When one of the ‘birds of spring’ is found dead, drowned alongside the same pier, and Jessica learns about two other deaths from the past, also connected to the orphanage, she has no choice but to try and put the pieces of this terrifying mystery together.

*Thoughts* The story is told in two-time levels, so in flashbacks, you learn a lot about life in the orphanage, which was not always unproblematic, and also about the fates of the individual children. In this book, everyone is a suspect. Even Jessica. Dead bodies have a tendency to appear whenever she's around. Jessica's co-workers like Yusuf play minium parts in this story since they are afraid that they will become the next target of Helena's wrath. With the surprise the author reveals in the middle of this mystery, I find it hard to believe that there will be another installment in this series.

I often see in reviews that it's number whatever of a series, but can easily be read as a standalone. While that's technically true of Ghost Island, book 4 in Max Seeck's Ghost of the Past series, that certainly isn't my recommendation. This is a series that's best read in order, so that you know all of Jessica's backstory, because I really think it adds to the enjoyment and understanding, and it's a great series -- so why not? I really liked the dual timeline with supernatural elements, and I'm eagerly awaiting the next installment!