As a writer, Karo Hämäläinen likes to experiment. He wasn’t the kind of boy who dismantled radios to see how they worked, but from an early age he took short stories and novels to pieces in order to see how words created feelings, thoughts and illusions.

In his best known work, a loose trilogy of financial thrillers, Hämälänen explores how the thriller genre operates. The three novels that form the trilogy, The Buyout, The Bailout and Cruel is the Night, differ considerably in structure, but what unites them is the theme of financial economics. As a novelist, structure is important to Hämäläinen. He feels that at the level of language a work should be easy to read and depth is created through content and structural devices.

Hämäläinen say that he strives for a smooth surface in his works, in the same way that the surface of a Giant’s kettle is smooth. He is a friend of functional aesthetics.