The Quiet Death
By Jussi Marttila and Lucian Staiano-Daniels
In 1628, in the midst of the devastation of the Thirty Years War, an unnamed soldier travels from Finland to Germany and becomes an officer in the Imperialist Army. Casual violence is the order of the day, but it is quiet deaths, killings without apparent motive, that puzzle the mind. So when a series of such brutal murders takes place, our protagonist is tasked to figure out what happened and why, as his regiment trudges toward the battle of Lützen.
Crime novelist Jussi Marttila and historian of seventeenth-century Europe Lucian Staiano-Daniels together use the moral catastrophe of Europe’s most destructive war to contextualize individual acts of destruction and of justice, testing the boundaries of cynicism and of muted hope.
Notices
“A well-written historical novel reflects not so much history as the present day. That is precisely the kind of book the reader is presented with here. The more we look into it, the more we realize it’s a mirror—and see ourselves in it.”
—Eugene Vodolazkin, author of Laurus
Jussi Marttila lives in Turku, Finland. He previously worked as a private investigator. He has written (in Finnish) a series of three crime novels about the private detective Janatuinen: Veden varaan (On the Water, 2020), Pimeä kuilu (Dark Abyss, 2022), and Lähdön läheisyys (Beginning of the End, 2024).
Lucian Staiano-Daniels is the author of The War People: A Social History of Ordinary Soldiers During the Era of the Thirty Years War (Cambridge University Press, 2024). has a BA in Great Books from St. John’s College, and a PhD in history from UCLA. He is currently a research and teaching fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.