B-
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
I am always looking for new female voices in crime fiction, and I picked up Leona: The Die is Cast with every expectation of being thrilled. It’s a Scandinavian mystery about a series of baffling bank robberies and it features a diverse heroine.
It turns out that this book was not at all what I was expecting, and in order to articulate that, I’m going to need to spoil some things. If you want to go into this book completely unspoiled, you really need to stop reading the review now.
My struggle with Leona: The Die is Cast wasn’t the plot or the pacing or the writing. It was the fact that I found the heroine so intensely unlikeable that my feelings toward her bordered on loathing.
When the book opens, Leona Lindberg, an investigator with Stockholm’s Violent Crimes Division, has been assigned an unusual case. A young girl, completely naked and covered in blood, has just robbed a bank. This is straight-up the kind of weird mystery I love.
At first Leona seems brash and unwilling to “play by the rules” if you will. She’s distanced herself from her husband, Peter, who wants to move out of the city to the suburbs. She feels overwhelmed by her young son’s severe Crohn’s disease, and the fact that they might need to leave the country to get him the surgery he requires.
All of this is fine and good. But as the novel progressed, I started to get the feeling that something was off with Leona. Her ability to connect to others is almost non existent, and she looks at all situations and people with regard to how they can personally benefit her. I’m not qualified to make this assessment since I have no medical training, but Leona reads like a sociopath. The only people she’s able to connect with at all are her children, and even then she acknowledges that she doesn’t feel the same way about them as most people would.
Leona admits that her entire life–her career, her marriage, her family–has been an effort on her part to be “normal.” It’s an act. And now that she’s prepared to admit she doesn’t actually want to be “normal,” she’s ready to leave all those things behind.
Huge spoiler here.
HUGE.
LIKE GIGANTO.
Leona is ready to leave her family. She’s preparing to set herself up financially so that she can go live the life she wants in Malta. The problem is that she’s a gambling addict, so her “preparation to leave” really means online poker, and by midway through the book she’s gambled away all of their savings. Including the money her son needs for surgery. The son she’s going to abandon.
See what I mean about loathsome?
But that got me thinking. I read mysteries and thrillers about shitty men all the time. It’s practically it’s own genre: men who literally cannot function as human beings but somehow solve murders. They’re deadbeat dads, alcoholics, corrupt cops. We see that character type in this genre all the time, and we’re expected to look past it because their inability to be decent people somehow amplifies their ability to solve crime or something.
Leona says it herself when she reflects:
Should I simply tell it the way it was? That the Leona most people knew was not me. That since I was little I had mechanically imitated other people to learn to fit in. Be accepted. That I couldn’t handle it anymore.
Family life.
Coworkers.
The police corridors.
The criminals.
The nine-to-five.
Explain that the everyday physical and social existence had mentally chained me, worse than when I was locked in the cellar as a child. Get her to understand that I could no longer repress what was me. That I had no choice but to break free from everything to be able to live, for real.
No, that would presumably sound insane to the ears of a normal person. No one would understand it. Women don’t do that. Only men commit crimes for that reason. For power. Money. For the freedom to leave everything.
Leona doesn’t even bother to pretend to be likable with the reader. She’s not the sort of heroine we find in Jane Doe by Victoria Helen Stone. That heroine and sociopath, Jane, is dispensing justice in a way that’s cathartic. Everything Leona does is for her personal benefit and often at the expense of people who don’t deserve to be hurt.
Which got me thinking, why do I expect to like female characters, when I don’t have that same expectations of male characters in the mystery genre? I go into a thriller expecting to relate and empathize with a female lead; I don’t with a male. Is it because society tells us, conditions us to believe women should always be likable?
When I set this preconceived notion aside, I found that while I kinda hated Leona, I really fucking liked this book. Her character is profoundly selfish and often mean, but she’s wound in such a tight web that I had to keep turning pages. I had to keep reading to find out what happened next because there was no way she could pull this off.
The mystery itself, the pacing, the plot–all of those things were exquisite. And I was torn between wanting Leona to fail and come to terms with justice, and wanting her to succeed because I wanted to see how the hell she would manage it.
This book ends on a cliffhanger, and I absolutely have to read the next book. I found myself so invested in the lives around Leona, if not really hers, that I was completely engaged with the story.
If you have to have a heroine you relate to, don’t read this book. If you’re prepared to be shocked, maybe to question your own approach to genre, to enjoy a really twisty thriller, then give Leona: The Die is Cast a try. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.
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I realize I’m making a broad generalization here, but I think women readers are inclined to give more of a pass to shitty behavior on the part of male characters than to female characters because we don’t identify with them so much. Usually, as I’m reading, I’m not necessarily seeing myself as the main female character, but I’m usually nodding my head in agreement or seeing things from her point of view. I very rarely do that with male characters—even likeable ones who are narrating in first-person voice. We can accept “bad behavior” on a male character’s part because we don’t personalize it as much as we do bad behavior on a female character’s part. Because the act of reading often involves empathy, sympathy, understanding, and a certain element of identification—and few of us want to see ourselves as unlikeable—we don’t want female characters to be “difficult.” Speaking just for myself, reading about an unlikeable female characters tends to be more emotionally exhausting than reading about a male character with similar traits. I also realize there are vast cultural/social messages that we are always processing subconsciously that make us want our heroines to exemplify our better selves—not so much with our heroes.
Hmm! This sounds intriguing enough for me to check out, even with the unlikeable main character.
I read a lot of mysteries where the female lead is unlikable to some extent or another. But it’s a matter of degree. Unlikable is not the same as totally heinous. And I wouldn’t give a pass to a male lead that fell into the latter category any more than I would the female.
I kept thinking of Jane Doe while reading the first part of your review so I’m glad you mentioned it. Even though she was an admitted sociopath, I really liked the lead. She was like an avenging, feminist superhero. And she was able to recognize and appreciate the innate goodness in others, to the point where she was willing to protect and nurture that goodness by whatever means she deemed necessary.
Still, I’m intrigued by your review, and the reasonable price makes me willing to take a chance on this book. Thx.
I think that, sadly, our experiences in the world as women have conditioned us to just think most (a lot? Some? All?) men are jerks. So it’s an accepted situation before you read the book and it doesn’t make you think about it especially. And in the gritty crime genres, a lot of the stories come from these really messed up protagonists. Sometimes, the author chooses to explain it as a reaction to all the bad stuff they see as cops/ investigators/ social workers/ whatever or a TRAJIC PAST. (TM everybody). Sometimes, the author doesn’t. I can seem where a woman is going to be more jarring, particularly to other women, who have always been taught not to make waves. I don’t think that would change my reading experience vs a male character.
However, I have always preferred the more stable detective. So, I read more in the cozy genre, where that is more common. And I watch (and read) Midsomer Murders instead of Criminal Minds. Dick Francis even sneaks in a peak of grisly into a few of his novels, but always featured a (only men☹️) hero of strong moral character.
Just my 2¢
This is so interesting to me because hearing that Leona does so many shitty things, I definitely don’t want to read the book. But I also made a decision to be very unforgiving in reading male main characters a while ago. Like, all the traits that Elyse described and main male characters being shitty make me put down the book and never pick it back up again. Even in non-romance books, I want the main characters to be heroes and heroines, and if they’re not I don’t want to read the book. in Jane Doe, Jane felt like a heroine. In Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell, the main character was a hit man for the mafia and is completing his medical residency while in Witness Protection, and even though he’s done awful things, he’s making an effort to be the hero in his story. Like, I want to read about people trying to be better, not succeeding despite wallowing in their faults, if that makes sense.
@Alexandra I like both Jane Doe and Beat the Reaper for those reasons also. Very flawed characters but relatable goals. Plus I was once a resident in SF so that added to my enjoyment of Beat the Reaper.