The Investigator. My 50 Years in The Finnish Police Force.

Every Crime Tells a Story

A respected criminal investigator looks back on his eventful career — from burglars in Kallio to genocidaires in Rwanda.

From the streets of Helsinki’s underworld to the world’s most dangerous conflict zones, Thomas Elfgren’s career spans almost fifty years of crime, justice and international upheaval. He began in a Finland still on the edge of Europe and went on to work against some of the gravest crimes of the modern age: the wars in the Balkans, the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the blood diamond conflicts of West Africa, and kidnapping cases in Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia.

This book is more than a police memoir. It is the story of one remarkable career set against Finland’s own transformation into a modern international state. What makes it stand out is its scope, its lived authority, and its rare ability to link the realities of everyday criminal investigation with war crimes, global networks and the hardest moral questions of our time.

Thomas Elfgren (b. 1954) is a former detective superintendent with the National Bureau of Investigation. He spends his retirement in the city of Gisenyi, Rwanda.