Before I Go

A fierce detective risks everything to unravel a tangle of secrets and corruption protecting a killer in this spellbinding seventh mystery in the tension-filled Maria Kallio series.

When Petri Ilveskivi is murdered in the street on his way to a city-planning meeting, Maria Kallio, commander of Espoo's Violent Crime Unit, and her team are first on the scene. Almost immediately, her focus is on the band of skinheads who brutally attacked the Finnish commissioner and his husband three years earlier. Did they finally finish the hate crime they started? But the trail soon reveals a web of lies—secrets Petri was keeping from even those closest to him—and a long list of suspects.

As she juggles her obligations as a wife, mother, and detective, Maria suggests to her superiors that what first appears to be a random assault may actually be something more sinister. When she's met with silence and higher-ups take her off the case, she disobeys orders and investigates on her own, putting both her family and herself at risk. In this captivating tale in the Maria Kallio series, someone is protecting a killer. Can Maria track them down before the next victim falls?

Leena Lehtolainen was born in Vesanto, Finland, to parents who taught language and literature. A keen reader, she made up stories in her head before she could even write. At the age of ten, she began her first book—a young adult novel—and published it two years later. She released her second book at the age of seventeen. She has received numerous awards for her writing, including the 1997 Vuoden Johtolanka (Clue) Award (for the best Finnish crime novel) for Luminainen (The Snow Woman) and the Great Finnish Book Club prize in 2000. Her work has been published in twenty-nine languages.

Besides writing, Leena enjoys classical singing, her beloved cats, and—her greatest passion—figure skating. Her nonfiction book about the sport, Taitoluistelun lumo (The Enchantment of Figure Skating), was chosen as the Sport Book of the Year 2011 in Finland. Leena lives in Finland with her husband and two sons.

Owen F. Witesman is a professional literary translator with a master’s in Finnish and Estonian-area studies from Indiana University. He has translated more than thirty Finnish books into English, including novels, children’s books, poetry, plays, graphic novels, and nonfiction. His recent translations include the first three novels in the Maria Kallio Series, the satire The Human Part by Kari Hotakainen, the thriller Cold Courage by Pekka Hiltunen, and the 1884 classic The Railroad by Juhani Aho. He currently resides in Springville, Utah, with his wife, three daughters, one son, two dogs, a cat, seven chickens, and twenty-nine fruit trees.