Just one spreadsheet away from chaos…

What makes life perfect? Insurance mathematician Henri Koskinen knows the answer because he calculates everything down to the very last decimal.

And then, for the first time, Henri is faced with the incalculable. After suddenly losing his job, Henri inherits an adventure park from his brother – its peculiar employees and troubling financial problems included. The worst of the financial issues appear to originate from big loans taken from criminal quarters … and some dangerous men are very keen to get their money back.

But what Henri really can’t compute is love. In the adventure park, Henri crosses paths with Laura, an artist with a chequered past, and a joie de vivre and erratic lifestyle that bewilders him. As the criminals go to extreme lengths to collect their debts and as Henri’s relationship with Laura deepens, he finds himself faced with situations and emotions that simply cannot be pinned down on his spreadsheets…

Warmly funny, rich with quirky characters and absurd situations, The Rabbit Factor is a triumph of a dark thriller, its tension matched only by its ability to make us rejoice in the beauty and random nature of life.

My thanks to Karen at Orenda Books for my review copy and to Anne Cater at Random Things Blog Tours for the opportunity to take part in the blog tour for The Rabbit Factor.

The exciting news about The Rabbit Factor (which I am sure you know already) is that Steve Carell loves the book and will play Henri in a movie adaptation for Amazon Studios. I don’t believe it is possible to know this and NOT picture Carell as Henri – I felt I knew the character from the outset.

But maybe that is because I had a bit of a head start? Henri is an actuary and works in Financial Services.  Although I am not smart enough to be an actuary I have certainly worked with a fair few actuaries down the years and could easily identify with Henri and the dilemmas he faced. You see, Henri craves order, precision and mathematics. He knows where he stands with mathematical accuracy – it is CORRECT. It can be qualtified. It does not entertain frivolity or feelings.

So when his employers stop putting their focus behind the calcuations and start synergizing and working in teams to consider how best to drive their corporate missions forward he feels decidedly out of his comfort zone. Things come to a head when his boss lays it out to Henri – embrace the softer, team focused ethos or take a hike. Henri walks, confident he will be snapped up by another firm. But Henri has misjudged the modern workplace – it’s all buzzwords and corporate bullshit these days and he doesn’t find a place as easily as he had expected.

Fate is to intervene though. Henri’s brother, the last of his family has sadly passed away. Henri inherits everything. But everything is a children’s Adventure Park and a whole lot of debt – debt which Henri isn’t used to dealing with as it did not come from the bank but from some unsavoury characters who don’t accept “no” for an answer.

Soon Henri is trying to deal with frustrated artists, ticket collectors with aims to become General Manager, broken machinery, absent staff and planning how best to avoid being killed by a frustrated loanshark. It’s an absolute riot but in Antti Tuomainen’s skilled hands it is also a delight to read.

The Adventure Park (never Amusement Park) becomes Henri’s focus. He can make it work, he can make it profitable and more importantly…he thinks he can use it to keep the moneylenders off his back. However Henri had not considered the possibility someone may just decide that they want him dead – can he survive long enough to outfox the criminals?

The Rabbit Factor delivers fun by the bucketload. Henri and the other Adventure Park staff are hugely engaging and the whole story is quirky and charming – well as quirky and charming as you can get with hitmen, dead bodies and hostile lapdancers.

Don’t sleep on this one.