Something to do with Montparnasse

Another twofer today, a bit more tenuous than the last one I posted. Cara Black's newest, Murder Below Montparnasse, and the newest translation from Helene Tursten, The Golden Calf, both have something to do with Montparnasse: Black's novel is set on the edges of the neighborhood, and Tursten's detective, Irene Huss, stays in a hotel on the edge of it when she has to take a junket to Paris in order to solve some murders in Göteborg. Plus both authors use a lot of detail about their detectives in the story (to very different effect).

Tursten first: The Golden Calf is one of the novels that has appeared in the Irene Huss TV series in Sweden (available with English subtitles), but based on memory alone, I'd say that in the case of this novel, the filmmakers have departed more from the book than they did with previous translations to TV drama. For good reason, in terms of the main plot, less so with respect to the detective's private life. For some reason the makers of the TV version (called Gold Digger in English) felt the need to create a mini-crisis in Huss's marriage; in the book, as is usual in the books, Huss and her husband, a succesful chef, get along just fine.

As to the story, we get plenty of atmosphere in both Göteborg and Paris, and lots and lots of detail about the financial and high-tech shenanigans of the circle of friends and business associates within which the murders are taking place (first one and then a pair of the group are murdered, along with the discovery that yet another has been missing for several years). In the book, the motive for the crime (as well as the identity of the killer) remains obscure until almost the end, and then is resolved in a "deus ex machina" fashion that involves the FBI. There's a lot of repetition of detail about the fraudulent financing of the group, and then a lot of detail about the motivations and background for the killers, coming all at once at the end. In the movie, the scheme and the resolution are better organized and more believable. All in all, I didn't think The Golden Calf was one of Tursten's best.

I get a little impatient with Cara Black's Aimée Leduc's books because somehow everything is always about Aimée, her associates, and her troubled family background, rather than about the crime at hand. That's certainly true of Murder Below Montparnasse, but her partner René is off to America at the beginning, for a change of pace and setting, and the detail about Paris is as always interesting. Because the series is set in the recent past and involves high-tech equipment, there's a bit of déjà vu in the revelations about new stuff (such as USB flash drives in this case), which is kind of funny. But the series lives or dies on the reader's relationship with Aimée.

In this case, a mysterious Russian tries to contact her, involves her in a possible murder, and then pulls away from her before letting her know what's going on (but not before implicating her mother in whatever it is). There's a painting (maybe a Modigliani) that would be a major discovery, if it exists, and the Montparnasse milieu of today blends with that of the painter's heyday throughout the story. There is a lot of back-and-forth movement across Paris (and California, while René is there), and considerable repeition (another link with The Golden Calf), but with a satisfactory resolution. I'd say that Murder Below Montparnasse is about on par with Black's usual standard.

Graveland, by Alan Glynn

Alan Glynn's new novel, Graveland, not only takes up where his most recent novels, Winterland and Bloodland, let off--it also takes up a theme of his first novel, The Dark Fields (made into the movie Limitless). I don't usually review U.S.-set crime fiction here, but since Graveland (set in New York City and upstate New York) is the third novel in a trilogy, and the first two novels are either set almost entirely in Ireland (Winterland) or mostly there (Bloodland), I'm making an exception.

Graveland doesn't continue the story in any literal way (as is the pattern of this trilogy): he simply uses characters that overlap the boundaries of the novels in various ways. The main character of Bloodland, Jimmy Gilroy, an Irish journalist, is a minor character in Graveland, and his mentor in the earlier novel, New York journalist Ellen Dorsey, is one of the main characters in the new book. In addition, the character who looms in the background of the first two books, the shadowy American financier and kingmaker James Vaughan, becomes even more prominent in Graveland.

The plotting of Graveland is one of its most interesting aspects. As in a lot of thrillers and crime novels (Graveland partakes of both modes), there are several seemingly unrelated plots at the beginning. An unemployed and divorced architect, Frank Bishop, languishes in a suburban retails store (selling high-tech game equipment, among other things), and is unable to reach his college-age daughter. On the heels of the world financial crisis, an investment banker and a hedge-fund manager are murdered on the street in New York. Vaughan is seemingly about to hand over the reins of his secretive private equity firm to his second-in-command, who's puzzled by both his boss's retirement and his health situation. And Ellen, who has turned her work on the failed presidential candidacy at the heart of Bloodland into a series of articles, has a nagging suspicion that the official story of the financial murders is incorrect.

Readers know in advance that these stories will come together. But Glynn keeps the plot fresh by seeming to head toward one sort of thriller plot and then veering off into something else. The shifts and surprises continue until well into the novel, and affect all the intersecting stories. An astute reader will figure out the final twist before the narrative makes it explicit, but not much before, and that reader will be pulled forward even more by the awful inevitability of what's going to happen.

Glynn keeps things moving rapidly forward, using dialogue and internal monologue rather than a more narrator-centric mode, keeping the story fresh and lively in the process. I found myself racing through the book's 383 pages. The resolution of the story not only ties up Graveland's plotlines, it also makes a fitting conclusion to the whole trilogy, without making any tedious attempt to replay the stories of the first two books, through Gilroy's brief appearance and the playing out of the Vaughan story. Winterland is about developers and politicians, Bloodland is about politicians and journalists, and Graveland is about financiers and journalists: but the whole set is really about money, and the pervasive and corrupting influence it has on contemporary life. If that's a lot for a few crime novels to carry, Glynn does it with flair, humor, and efficient but elegant writing.

One from Istanbul, one from Barcelona

Baksheesh, by Esmahan Aykol, and The Sound of One Hand Killing, by Teresa Solana, have a few things in common. Both have considerable comic elements; both have a meta-fictional premise (Aykol's heroine, Kati, owns a crime fiction bookstore, so there are frequent references to crime writers; and the client for whom Solana's unlicensed private detectives, twin brothers Borja and Eduard, are working is a crime writer named Teresa Solana. Plus both are set in Istanbul and Barcelona, cities not unknown to crime fiction but less heavily represented in the genre than, say, Italy or France, not to mention U.K. and U.S.

But The Sound of One Hand Killing is more clearly satirical in intent. Solana is skewering Catalonian society, as in her earlier novels, and new-age fads this time as well. The social climbers and herbal-medicine consumers in the book are quite funny, though Borja and Eduard are somewhat lacking in the traditional skills of the fictional private detective. The joke about Solana being their client isn't leaned on too heavily, so we're not subjected to the full-on metafiction of a few other contemporary crime-comedy writers. Despite the murder of the head guru of the health spa that the brothers have infiltrated on Solana's behalf, the tone is light and the pace fairly languid. It's less a page-turner than a light entertainment.

Aykol's tone is also fairly light, but there's more tension. The main concern of our heroine, Kati, is finding a new apartment, after her landlord has announced a rate increase. She briefly becomes a suspect in the murder of a squatter in an apartment that she seeks to rent (he menaced her and she him), but the murder mystery (and the tension of her being accused) dissipates somewhat in Kati's pursuit of the dead man's lover and family, which she manages to infiltrate. The result is a breezy tour through neighborhoods and homes of Turks that tourists would not normally see, with the romance of Aykols first novel, Hotel Bosphorus, mostly (but not entirely) replaced with real-estate lust. As with Solana's novel, Baksheesh is not much of a page turner. The ending, though, is truer to the characters than to the conventions of crime fiction, in an interesting way. Aykol's intention is less satirical than Solana's and more sociological, exploring the corruption and everyday life of the denizens of Istanbul, in the working class as well as professionals and those aspiring to social status (Kati's bookshop offers her inroads into both, which she exploits as necessary).

Both are enjoyable reads and neither is a conventional crime novel. Either would be an effective antidote for an overdose of noir or cozy reading.

Dead Lions, by Mick Herron

A few years ago, a review copy of a book by an author I hadn't heard of, Mick Herron, arrived in my mailbox courtesy of Soho Crime publishers. The book was Slow Horses; its sequel, Dead Lions, arrived a couple of weeks ago, and the only reservation I have about the new book is that its predecessor was so good that it set an impossible standard for the current story.

After reading Slow Horses, I went back and worked my way through Herron's earlier books, which are all very good. The first one, Down Cemetery Road, is a wonderful book that not only introduces a unique character (private detective Zoe Boehm, who returns in several sequels) but also begins with one of the funniest set pieces I have ever encountered in a crime novel, set (believe it or not) in a dinner party in a suburban home).

Slow Horses introduced Slough House, a sort of halfway house for disgraced spies, members of Britain's MI5 that the organization is hoping to induce to leave the service by setting them up for endless bureaucratic tasks and perpetual boredom in an office distant from the central hub of headquarters. The novel also features some of the twistiest plotlines in crime fiction, something that all of Herron's books share. Dead Lions offers the same setting and the same pleasure in following the sudden twists and turns, but in a somewhat different context. Slow Horses dealt with terrorism (or, more properly, the manipulation of the fear of terrorism). Dead Lions deals with the remnants of the Cold War, within and beyond the security services.

Jackson Lamb, a central but not the main character of the earlier book, is at the very center here. He's a scruffy old warrior, set out to pasture in Slough House, in charge of the other "slow horses," as they are known in the service. When a former agent shows up dead on a train, Lamb involves his team of losers in finding out what might have led up to the death. From that point, the story involves embedded spies, gangsters, former KGB agents (some real and some mythical), and even young love (some casual, some committed, always dangerous). The story is funny but also very dark, and the specter of John LeCarré is explicitly invoked but also undercut or recast in a 21st century landscape.

The novel is beautifully written but also elegantly structured. I have spoken before of a setpiece at the beginning of one of Jo Nesbø's novels, in which a drop of water is followed as it runs through an old house. Herron offers not one but two setpieces, to frame the novel, but just as it's not good to offer spoilers about a book's plot, it's wrong to telegraph the pleasures of reading a well-built book. Ever since finishing Slow Horses (and passing it along to anyone I could think of), I've been waiting for a possible sequel. Now that it's here, I have the pleasure of experiencing it, along with the pang of having finished it (and having to wait again, for more from Herron). I see that he has a story coming out that revives the career of Zoe Boehm--perhaps that will tide me over...

Marek Krajewski, The Minotaur's Head

Since 2008, Marek Krajewski's crime novels featuring detective Eberhard Mock in the (then) German city of Breslau have been appearing in English, courtesy first of McLehose Press and more recently Melville International Crime, in the order of their original publication in Polish. Now we have a fourth Eberhard Mock novel, but it looks like they've skipped four of the Polish originals to bring out the 8th novel in English, not the 4th through 7th. It's wonderful to have Mock back again, but I have to wonder about those missing books, especially since the first three were in a very unusual pattern, each novel set earlier than the previous one,not sustainable, of course, unless we eventually ended up with Eberhard Mock, toddler-detective; but I wonder when the pattern was actually broken--since the new book is set after the first three. Mock is now integrated into the German Army, but is sent back into police-work to assist in the pursuit of a serial killer who has struck Breslau after two earlier killings in Lwow.

At first unwillingly, and then fully engaged in the task, Mock is instructed to work with Polish detective named Popielski, a wonderful creation who seems at first totally opposite to Mock, but who actually has some common ground with him. The serial killer seems to be selecting only young virgins to mutilate and murder, and Popielski is in mortal fear that his own daughter will be the next victim.

The situation seems like a normal crime-novel plot, but as anyone who has read any of Marewski's books will know, these are not normal crime novels. Krajewski explores the lower depths of prewar Germany and Poland beetween the wars through not only the crimes but also the character of the thoroughly debased Mock himself. With the more-or-less straitlaced Popielski as a foil, The Minotaur's Head is at first somewhat less decadent than the first three books, but Popielski has some secrets that are gradually reveales, not to mention the gradual revelation of what is actually going on in the murders. By the time we reach the end, we have twisted downn into the murk along with the characters, who achieve a form of justice almost in spite of themselves.

And Popielski seems ripe for appearance, in a somewhat changed role, in future novels (I won't provide any spoilers). The Mock series is very dark and sometimes very funny (also in a dark way). Human appetites of all sorts are explored in the stories, in a style that is both jagged and literary, often with aspects of the author's classical scholarship in evidence (but in a playful way). The arrival of a new Krajewski novel in the landscape of English-language crime fiction is like a lurid spark that illuminates another way of doing and thinking about crime fiction, an illicit pleasure that the author graciously shares with the reader.

Lars Kepler's The Nightmare

The Nightmare, the sequel to a prominent Swedish crime of recent years, The Hypnotist, by a husband and wife writing team known as Lars Kepler, has the bones of a good book, undermined, especially in the first half, by some obvious flaws. Joona Linna, a Finno-Swedish super-detective, is alternately held in awe by other cops and squeezed out of investigations by the police hierarchy and the security police (in typical crime-fiction fashion). The awe he inspires in other cops is naively presented, and the obstructions placed in his way are a bit cliched. But these problems fade away in the second half, particularly with the development of a new character, Saga Bauer (whose name unfortunately coincides with the wonderful female character in the Danish-Swedish TV series, The Bridge, as well as a recurring description of her as rather elfin--fortunately she's simply a bit under-confident rather than autistic-ish, like the TV Saga).

Joona Linna (who's almost always described by his full name) is not, in his own mind, quite the superman that other people think he is. He's even a bit insecure, at times, despite the intuition that is his strongest investigative tool. The authors give him a flaw (a recurring severe migraine that he under-treats because the medicine fogs his mind), and he has a murky and evidently tragic past that only slowly comes to light for the reader. Joona's amazing investigative abilities are something like those of Jo Nesbø's detective Harry Hole, but Joona is a bit less self-destructive; both characters can be a bit irritating in their super-abilities, but neither is ultimately totally unbelievable, and Joona is if anything a bit less superhuman than Harry. There is, however, one action by Joona in the climax that is hardly believable (but then some of Harry's exploits beggar belief, too).

A number of the other characters, on the other hand, are cliches; the security police and SWAT team are drawn as bloodthirsty cardboard cutouts of their roles, especially early in the book. Some of the victims and a number of characters who are mostly bystanders do have individual personalities, and the settings are vividly drawn.

The writing is direct and effective, though there are stylistic quirks that are a bit distracting, particularly in the time-framing of overlapping episodes, such as a chapter early on that repeats almost exactly the chapter that went before, with a slightly different focus and time. There is also a chase sequence that goes on for a very, very long time. And as the plot gets more and more complicated, there begin to be some rather gothic and graphically cruel elements to the story, not everyone's taste I expect.



The plotting is the real strength of the book, along with the scene-setting. There are, however, some flashbacks that are intended to illuminate some of the character's biography and motivation, but some of these simply impede the story and pad out the page-count and may induce a bit of skimming on the reader's part.

Perfect Hatred, Leighton Gage

Leighton Gage's new Mario Silva novel, Perfect Hatred, is the second book that I've recently read that's partly set in the wild Tri-Border Area, where Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay meet. The first was Sebastian Rotella's Triple Crossing, which drops a U.S. Border agent, undercover with a Mexican drug gang, into the lawless area. Gage's novel probes more deeply into the political and social realities of the area, as well as the impact of the lawlessness on the surrounding countries.

Perfect Hatred brings together three crimes: a terrorist bombing, the assassination of a regional politician, and a corrupt Brazilian's plot to assassinate the prosecutor who is about to put him in jail as well as Silva himself. A reader might expect the three plots to come together in the end, but Gage subverts the usual plot devices, while keeping all three plots moving rapidly forward.

Silva's team of federal police agents is split by his boss, half following the terrorist plot and half the political assassination. A young Muslim has kidnapped a baby, after murdering its mother, and planted a bomb in the baby's carriage, which explodes outside the U.S. consulate in São Paulo. In Curitiba, a candidate for governor of the state is shot in the head, along with a former associate of Silva's team, who has shot and killed the assassin.

One interesting development in this book is that the individuals on Silva's team have become so strongly characterized that Silva himself, though at the center of everything, does not dominate the story. Instead, the lead role is split among the team members, each an independent element in the collaborative whole. The result is a re-examination of the police procedural format, within the rapidly forward-moving story. Perfect Hatred is about justice and revenge, and the intertwining stories reach resolution in indirect ways, sometimes through inaction rather than action, or through outside actors being drawn into the plot. But Silva's team remains at the center, holding their own against a vividly drawn cast of other characters who range from outright villains through zealots, idealists, and innocent bystanders.

This is the sixth of Gage's Silva novels, each of which takes a different approach to the crime story and to the portrait of Brazil that he is progressively compiling. The books not only don't repeat themselves, they are also getting better and better as the series progresses.

Arne Dahl: Books and Films

When it came out in English, Arne Dahl's Misterioso was obviously (to me) one of the best crime novels to have arrived from Scandinavia. So I was thrilled to learn that a Swedish TV-film based on that and the 4 subsequent "Intercrime" novels were available with English subtitles. The movie-version of Misterioso was very good, and faithful to the plot, characters, and spirit of the book. Subsequent films were equally good, but the second in the series, Bad Blood (Ont Blod in the original Swedish) dipped into the lurid serial killer segment of the crime fiction spectrum--not my favorite fictional neighborhood. I'm glad I saw the film, because in addition ot the clever cruelty, the characters in the ensemble cast were developed further, plus there's some interesting international politics and intrigue.

But now there's a dilemma. Bad Blood, the novel, is about to be released in English. Would the skill of the writer overcome the distaste I have for the lurid subject matter? Does the movie version in any way stand in for the book, or substitute for it? Usually the experience of reading is enough different from the experience of watching that I don't mind revisiting the book after the film or vice versa. Any thoughts on watching the same plot you've already read, or reading the same story you've already watched?

I think I'm coming down on the side of skipping the on-paper version of Bad Blood--not only because of the serial killer plot, but also because of the height of my current TBR stack. If anybody's interested, I can post reviews of the series (I'm halfway through the 4th installament--each book becomes 2 90-minute episodes). I also just learned that "Arne Dahl," both the name of the author and the title of the TV series, is a pseudonym for the writer Jan Arnald.

Irish noir: Declan Burke's Slaughter's Hound

Lately I've been reading books by authors who write novels in pairs or trilogies rather than open-ended series, which seems a relatively recent phenomenon in the crime fiction world. In several cases, the switch from one series or trilogy to another is also a shift in style or genre. For just one example, Carlo Lucarelli's DeLuca series (historical police procedurals) is quite different from his Grazia Negro books (serial killer stories), and different still from his Coliandro stories (which are comic, parodies of the police procedural). All of these series seem to be closed, without further installments (though there is one Grazia Negro book that hasn't been translated, Lupo Mannaro or Werewolf).

Declan Burke has just published Slaughter's Hound, the sequel (and seemingly final installment) to his first book, Eightball Boogie. These two books, featuring not-exactly detective Harry Rigby, are hard-boiled noir, in the tradition of Chandler and Ross MacDonald, but with a contemporary relentlessness and literary references that might remind a reader of a more recent noir writer, Ken Bruen. Burke's other pair of novels, The Big O and Crime Always Pays, are lighter, more in a comic or farcical but still noir tone, closer to Elmore Leonard than Jim Thompson. Neither series resembles Burke's brilliant stand-alone metafiction, Absolute Zero Cool.

Burke's literary references are not intrusive or artificial, but integral to his first-person narrator's character and to the story, and range from Joyce, Beckett, and Yeats to Bukowsky and William Gaddis (who is particularly relevant to one aspect of the overall story, dealing with forgery). One reference is closely related to the dark violence of the story, an image and an act that suggest two grotesque passages in Bataille's Story of the Eye and Kosinski's Painted Bird, though neither writer is mentioned. Neither the literary asides nor the overarching paen to an obscure Irish rock band, Rollerskate Skinny (who I confess I thought Burke had made up until I did a web search) slow down the inexorable downward spiral of Harry's life.

Harry is recently released from incarceration in a mental facility, to which he was confined after killing his brother at the end of Eightball Boogie. A roommate there is the son of a wealthy family right out of Ross MacDonald or even Chinatown, and part of the pleasure of the novel is Rigby's narrative exploration of the intricacies of this spectacularly dysfunctional family. The current Irish financial collapse is also a factor, as it plays out on the bars, alleys, and docks of Sligo, on Ireland's northwest.

Rigby's is an entertaining voice to spend time with, which relieves some of the pain in his story, though in the final section, the pain takes precedence, though there is an almost joyful resignation that echoes the passages repeatedly drawn from Rollerskate Skinny's repertoire. It's a dark journey, but rewarding for an intrepid reader.

Ratlines, by Stuart Neville

Stuart Neville's new novel is something of a departure: his previous novels deal with the violent aftermath of the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland, after the peace accord. Beginning with The Ghosts of Belfast, these were some of the most accomplished crime novels of the current Irish wave of crime writing. Ratlines goes back in time, to the aftermath of another war, World War II.

Albert Ryan is a Protestant Irishman who fought for the British during the war. Now an odd man out (both as an ex-soldier in civilian society and as both a Protestant and someone who didn't follow the orthodoxy of Irish neutrality. One aspect of that neutrality has come back to haunt him, along with those he killed (an overlap with The Ghosts of Belfast, though not emphasized here in the same way as that earlier novel).

Like most readers, I was not aware of the Irish government's policy of giving sanctuary to Nazis and Nazi collaborators after the end of the war. On the eve of John Kennedy's presidential visit to Ireland, someone is raising the profile of these unsavory characters by systematically murdering them. Charles Haughey, justice minister and future prime minister, enlists Ryan to find the murderers and to report not only to the government but to the most high-profile of the Nazi "guests," a famous strategist in the war. The title refers to lines of communication and transportation set up to rescue war criminals from the victorious allies, in the aftermath of war and even later.

So far, it sounds like a fairly conventional thriller. But the alliances and betrayals, the sharp characterizations, and the uncertain morality of all concerned keep the story leaning over the edge of conventional storytelling into an edgier and more interesting territory. Ryan is particularly interesting: he's not a leading man (in terms of looks and savoir-faire), a genius, or a martial-arts star (though there's a sort of parody of the James Bond sort of martial expertise, in a fencing match). He's a "good soldier" with little to gain or lose in this investigation that's been forced on him. He can only negotiate as best he can the dangerous and violent situation he's been thrust into.

The whole post-war-Nazi thing has been much mined by crime and thriller writers, but Neville uses it in a novel way, to reveal something about Irish history as well as the characters in the story. Though historical fiction (even recent history) is not my usual cup of tea, Ratlines is an excellentn read that held my interest completely.

Only one of Giorgio Scerbanenco's crime novels featuring Dr. Duca Lamberti had been published in English translation (Duca and the Milan Murders) before Hersilia Press brought out the very first Duca story, A Private Venus, last year. When I read Duca and the Milan Murders years ago, it struck me as a conventional murder mystery--but now, having read A Private Venus, I'm going to have to go back and re-read it (if I can find it), because A Private Venus is anything but conventional.

Duca is a disgraced physician, just released from prison, when a wealthy man offers him an unconventional job, watching over (and if possible, detoxifying) the alcoholic waster who is his son. Duca takes the job, not having any other prospects, but discovers that there is a crime underlying the young man's lethargy and alcoholism. He enlists the help of a policeman from his past as well as a young woman that he meets, but basically Duca draws all the narrative energy upon himself.

Which is a bit of a problem, since that young woman is the most interesting character in the book, and she reaps the whirlwind sown by Duca. I won't go into any more detail, but Duca makes some extraordinarily stupid decisions as he tracks down the criminals, but he's not the one who will pay the price for the mistakes.

The writing style is a bit indirect and always interesting, and a reader is drawn along by the characters, especially the unfortunate young woman, into the seedy, noir milieu of post-War Milan. The criminal enterprise at first seems even a bit quaint, but turns as sinister as any current crime before the end. Scerbanenco presents a moral conundrum for the reader: Can we empathize with Duca when he is drawing misfortune on other characters? If anyone remembers Duca and the Milan Murders or has read any of the other books in the original Italian, please let us know if Duca becomes a character that it's easier to identify with.

Babylon, Camilla Ceder

Camilla Ceder's Babylon, the second in her series featuring detective Christian Tell and his (now) girlfriend Seja Lundberg, has a family resemblance to a specific end of the Scandinavian crime spectrum: specifically that occupied by Mari Jungstedt and Camilla Läckberg. In all these writers' books, a central male character (a policeman or a reporter) meets a woman who is a witness in the first book's crime, and they become a couple in later books. In Läckberg's case, the non-cop/reporter female character is her central character, Erica Falck, is her central character and continues to be involved in crimes and investigations. In the cases of Jungstedt and Ceder, the relationship remains central to the stories, but the non-professional partner is less involved directly in the crimes (though in the case of Jungstedt she's dragged into events at least once more).

Also, the books by all three are about the people in the story more than the crimes. And in all three, the private lives of the central characters remain an important aspect of the books, even when not directly related to the current plot. For example, Seja, in Babylon, is not really involved in the crime plot at all, but still remains a central character, with a good portion of the book told from her point of view. In other Scandinavian crime fiction, the detective's private life is frequently part of the action, but the wife/husband/partner is less central to the story (think of two other writers whose books are, like Ceder's, set in Göteborg, Åke Edwardson and Helene Tursten).

The emphasis on the partnership rather humanizes the investigator in the books of Ceder, Jungstedt, and Läckberg, but also shifts the stories somewhat away from the "noir" end of the crime fiction spectrum, which traditionally focuses on loners or at least detectives with difficult private lives. The observation isn't a value judgment--just an observation about the nature of Ceder's books.

The plot of Babylon has something to do with the title's historic region, but is mostly set in and around Göteborg. There's a rural aspect, too, since Seja continues to live in a remote cabin with no indoor plumbing (something that's hard for me, at least, to grasp in a Swedish setting--imagine the outhouse on cold nights...

But Ceder conveys both urban and rural settings vividly. The story starts with an interesting character who's more than a bit of a mess, a character who might have been more central to the story than she turns out to be here. She's a jealous girlfriend whose live-in boyfriend is murdered, along with his academic mentor (who is also his lover). The evidence points toward the jealous girlfriend, but there's a break-in at her house that raises other possibilities. The ex-husband of the mentor is implicated, and the reader gets a glimpse of the men involved in the break-in--leading to complications and shifts between Denmark, Turkey, and Sweden that Ceder handles very well.

I have to confess a preference for crime fiction with a somewhat less domestic focus (hence the title of this blog), but Ceder manages to keep a reader's interest in her characters, even the ones who don't figure directly in the crime. The uneasy relationship between Seja and Christian is solidly based in their personalities, but I confess I becaue a little impatient with the amount of time devoted to their personal pleasures and difficulties rather than with the crime at hand. My prejudice as a reader, I'm sure. I'll probably continue with Ceder's series, but my main interest in Swedish crime fiction is at the other end of the spectrum I mentioned above.

Crime in Singapore

Apparently Jake Needham's newly published second volume of his Inspector Tay series, The Umbrella Man, is available only in a Kindle version because the government of Singapore is not happy with his portrayal of their island republic. Having been to Singapore, and having just read The Umbrella Man, I can well believe that. The novel is about the blending of personal, professional, and cultural disasters, but the story is grounded in an unusually direct portrayal of the consequences of Singapore's quest for stability and prosperity at the expense of other democratic goals.

The novel begins with a series of bombings that will inevitably suggest terrorist attacks across the world (particularly, to an American reader at least, 9/11). The attack destroys the architectural and commercial heart of the city-state, as well as the confidence of its citizens. But Tay, due to the events of the previous novel, The Ambassador's Wife, is persona non grata with his own superiors and with the U.S. authorities who are elbowing their way into the bombing investigation. Tay is shunted aside into the investigation of a single, seemingly insignificant, murder in an apartment at the distant edge of Singapore.

But Tay is, of course, determined to leverage his assignment into an investigation of the larger crime, and with the help of his long-suffering assistant, as well as a coroner, and a few others (including the mysterious American spook who played a large role in The Ambassador's Wife, plus a ghost from Tay's past) Tay stumbles up against both the truth and the solid resistance of almost everyone else involved in the bombing investigation.

The story is not a straight-ahead police procedural or thriller. Tay is led back and forth from his own family history to various possible truths about the smaller and the larger case, through official theories about the bombing and the murder and through versions of the truth that relate directly to Singapore's politics and culture. The ending evolves directly from Tay's life and his dogged pursuit, without stretching credulity or falling into the cliches of grand international conspiracy (a sort of novel for which I have little use). Needham, in fact, leads the reader forward with Tay's convictions and uncertainties, into the avenues and the back streets of a Singapore that he has surgically opened up with the fictional device of the bombings. The result is an unusually potent combination of the potent drivers of noir, criminal acts and social insight.

Missing Maxine

I have to add my voice to the chorus mourning the loss of Maxine Clarke, who was not only a great reader and a great blogger (as Petrona) but also a great reader of blogs. It has been her voice more than any other who has tied together the crime fiction bloging community, and she is irreplaceable.

International crime, corruption, fraud

The Eyes of Lira Kazan is a new thriller from France, written by a journalist (Judith Perrignon) and a prosecutor (Eva Joly) and translated by Margaret Crosland and Elfreda Powell (published by Bitter Lemon). As you might expect, there's plenty of realistic detail in this story of corruption and murder across international borders, in the age of our current financial crisis. But the story is also compelling and well-written, in a straightforward, ensemble style reminiscent of some of Dominique Manotti's novels (the documentary and ensemble ones more than the series based on a Inspector Daquin). In my opinion, that's a high standard.

The story brings together several threads, from a Nigerian fraud investigator forced to flee the country to a Russian Journalist (the title character), to a court clerk in Nice, a russian oligarch, and a banker-fisherman from the Faroe islands. The oligarch figures mostly in the background, as a ruthless gangster who needs a lot of money laundered, and he thought he had found the perfect laundry in the banking system of the tiny Scandinavian outpost in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. But the Faroes bank is caught up in the same house of cards that brought down the banks of Iceland, and suddenly the whole system of illegal currency is threatened with collapse, and with violent retribution. The banker's wife drowns in Nice, dressed in an evening gown, and the clerk and his judge follow the trail of murder and money in dangerous directions.

Lira is at the center of the story: It's her journalistic pursuit of the oligarch that draws the others in (the Russian mobster is implicated not only in the Faroes bank but also in Nigerian fraud and corruption and government machinations in France). Lira travels to London to meet the Nigerian emigre but is attacked on the street, and her injury draws the characters and the story together.

The three crusaders from Russia, Nigeria, and France are threatened not only by the mobster but also by at least 2 governments, and can trust no one. They go on the run and rely ultimately upon the weapons of the 21st century to find at least some measure of justice (in [Spoiler Alert] what seems to me to be a bit of revenge fantasy that leaps just a bit beyond the novels dominant realism and pessimism--not a flaw in the story so much as a bit of skeptical hope built into its conclusion).

This is a slow-paced story that doesn't rely on dramatic representation of violence for its effect (most of the violence is "offstage" or understated). It's the threat felt not only personally but also politically and culturally by these characters that tightens the story and involves the reader. The "good guys" aren't flawless heroes, they're full characters with plenty of flaws, who in many ways draw themselves into the danger that threatens them. If you need a thriller with lots of blood and violence, this is perhaps not the book for you. But if you are looking for something more rooted in the realism of our international milieu, more coomplex and less obvious--I'd recommend The Eyes of Lira Kazan, and I hope Joly and Perrignon keep writing books like this.

Border Noir

Journalist Sebastian Rotella has published a first novel that is a convincing, well-written, and evocative portrait of the border regions of San Diego/Tijuana and the Triple Border in South America (where Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet).

It's an ensemble story, without a single lead character (though it begins and ends with Valentine Pescatore, a young U.S. border patrol agent). Besides Pescatore, there's a Mexican human rights activist turned cop (leader of an elite anti-corruption squad), the Mexican woman who took his place when he quit the human rights agency, an American woman who's an agent for the border patrol's inspector general (a "rat squad" sort of thing), and numerous policemen and narco-criminals.

The plot takes sudden twists and turns--when it seems like the story is going in a conventional cops-and-drug-lords or border-agents-and-illegal-immigrants direction, it will suddenly veer into the corruption story or an undercover cop story or a story of betrayal (of several sorts). Rotella keeps all of the above convincing, through his skill in writing as well as his refusal of a coherent single plotline. All the characters, even minor ones (even ones who speak hardly at all) are vivid, and there is considerable skepticism about characters who would be the good guys in a more conventional novel, as well as sympathy (of a sort, at least) with the gangster crews. There are also various references to adventure novels of the past (in particular The Three Musketeers).

The various U.S., Mexican, and tri-border settings are also convincing and complex, as well as the varied and powerful threats that the characters live under in each of those settings. One of the more startling settings is a Mexican prison that is surreal, but clearly based in reality.

I received this book as a review copy (thanks, Mulholland Books), with a different cover (there are a couple of different covers out there, shifts in the marketing campaign I guess. The cover of the copy I have is a bit more subtle than the one above (just the border fence and an over-flying helicopter), and the one above is a bit less busy than another one that's out there, which has the same image but white stripes across the cover (kind of busy, if you ask me).

I actually put off reading this book for a while after I received it, thinking it was just a border-thriller (and too American, perhaps, for a blog that is supposed to be international). But it's not a conventional border story, and there's plenty of international perspective.

Comic noir collaboration: Camilleri and Lucarelli

Acqua in Bocca is a short novel published in 2010 (by minimum fax, a publisher in Rome) in an almost epistolary style: an exchange between characters created by Andrea Camilleri and Carlo Lucarelli (Salvo Montalbano and Grazia Negro, respectively) in the process of an investigation of a murder in Bologna. The book actually resulted from a correspondence between the two authors, instigated by the publisher almost on a whim and then executed over time (the process is explained ina postscript). The book is unfortunately only available in Italian.

The story is fairly simple: a body is discovered on the floor of an apartment, a plastic bag over the victim's head and the corpses of a couple of "beta splendens" (Siamese Fighting Fish) nearby. Later, another fish is discovered in the corpse's windpipe, a contributing cause to the death. Ispettore Grazia Negro is assigned the case, but certain aspects of the case cause her to be circumspect with her superiors about what she is doing.

The witness who discovered the body then disappears, traced to a train station in Sicily, near Vigata, where Montalbano is the Commissario. Grazia, persistent in spite of being warned, contacts Salvo, asking him to be discreet. The exchange that follows is frequenty very funny, with Salvo taking different positions in his open and secret communications and messages passing back and forth concealed in cannoli (dispatched from Sicily) and tortellini (dispatched from Bologna).

Gradually, many of the characters in other books by the two authors appear in supporting roles (sometimes not directly "seen" but in the background of the story), including Mimi and Catarella from Sicily and Cogliandro from Bologna. Camilleri's contributions are frequently funny, particularly for anyone familiar with the Montalbano series, but Lucarelli's are also full of puns (including some characters' names), as well as other comic complications.

The book is short and (by the nature of the project) episodic, with documents and photographs interspersed in the text (Montalbano and Negro represented, obviously enough, from the TV series based on him and the movie based on her).

When the action shifts from Bologna to Milano Marittima, where Grazia has fled from those threatened by her investigation, the story takes a dark, but still comic, turn that it only partly explained by the final missive from Montalbano: we must choose to believe whether a violent act is intentional or coincidental.

Acqua in Bocca is light entertainment in a noir/comic mode. I read it a couple of times, as I've been studying Italian, with increasing comprehension--the language is fairly straightforward, if occasionally frustratingly idiomatic (Google Translate was sometimes more help than a dictionary). It was a lot of fun to practice Italian with, leading me onward to at least somewhat more literary texts (including several by Lucarelli and some I've just begun to tackle by Loriano Machiavelli (also quite comic in a particular way). My Italian teacher says she learned English by listening to pop music from England and America, because she was motivated to understand the lyrics, so I suppose my version of that is reading Italian noir, a rich vein of international crime fiction.

2 questions and 2 books

If anyone's listening, I have a couple of questions for you. First, I've been learning Italian, and have gotten enough of the language to start reading noir (which the Italians call "gialli" or yellows) if the language the author is using isn't too difficult. So is anyone interested in reviews of books in Italian that are not available in English, and perhaps unlikely to be? I don't pretend to get every nuance of the stories, but armed with a dictionary (and sometimes Google Translate) I can at least follow the stories.

Second question, related to the books reviewed below, should bloggers review books that are disappointing, but not terrible? I don't want to warn readers off of books that I liked well enough to finish, but wasn't enthusiastic about (perhaps other readers might be more engaged by them)? Dead Man Upright, the fifth book in Derek Raymond's groundbreaking Factory series, but previously unpublished in the U.S, is in line with the others, in terms of style and pace until the last quarter o the book, when the unnamed Sergeant (the main character in the series) and a psychologist begin to interview the serial killer that they've been chasing. The conversations are interesting, and certainly relevant to any fictional (or real-world, for that matter) consideration of the phenomenon of the serial killer, but for me the pace and drive of the story are over.

Operation Napoleon, by Arnaldur Indridason, is a stand-alone thriller by the author of the excellent Icelandic series featuring Erlendur and the other detectives of his squad. Napoleon is, instead, about a plane that crashed in Iceland at the end of World War II, bearing some sort of secret, and the intrigue that occurs when the glacier that has been hiding the plane gives it back up to the light of day.

There's one interesting aspect of the book fro an American reader: the author evidently expects readers to accept that American military men and intelligence agents will be willing to do absolutely anything, no matter how heinous, in the pursuit of their ends. I don't necessarily disagree, but the degree of demonization is beyond that of, say, the Bourne sort of thing, and other U.S. thrillers with U.S. military and intelligence villains. But with that positive side of the story set aside, the book seemed to be repetitive and, except for the passages near the beginning when the story of a woman caught up in the drama begins to be established. The woman, Kristin, is a lawyer whose brother is unfortunate enough to witness the uncovering of the plane. He calls her just at the point when he's captured by the U.S. soldiers. What ensues, along with a threat from another angle, moves along at a good clip as a "chase" story for a while, but then gets bogged down in the details of the plane and its secret.

So conspiracy fans may get more out of the book than I did. Erlendur fans will probably sorely miss the gloomy detective and his team, as well as the procedural format of which Indridason is a master.

Is the above too negative, or am I revealing too much about the plot of the two books?

A Murder in Tuscany, Christobel Kent

A Murder in Tuscany is the second of Christobel Kent's Florence mysteries featuring private detective (and former cop) Sandro Cellini (there's already a third one, but I haven't gotten to it yet). Most of the action in this book takes place in the Tuscan hills rather than in Florence itself.

Sandro is having trouble building a clientele for his business. He is at the beginning of the story simply tailing a teenage girl, whose father thinks she's getting in with the wrong crowd. He's also beginning to fear that his wife, recently recovered from breast cancer, is drifting away from him.

But Sandro gets a call from an artist's colony in the Maremma hills, whose director has been killed when her car slides off an icy road late at night. But her husband, a prominent attorney, doesn't believe the police's conclusion that her death is simply an accident

The book proceeds very slowly, partly through the eyes of a young woman employed at the artist's colony, and we see a lot of the artists and staff there without really getting to know any of them very well. Several theories of the crime slowly develop, by means of a narrative that frequently twists back on itself. Kent's writing is always clear, but in the back and forth of the characters' recent memories and present moment, it would be possible to get really confused if you put the book down for a while and then try to come back to it.

A Murder in Tuscany is a well written "country house" mystery, more or less in the English tradition, with a closed group of possible suspects and a narrow frame of reference (plus an annoying aristocrat and a "below stairs" contingent. But there's really not much plot. Toward the end the characters begin to move around a bit more, but there's only a brief moment of uncertainty or threat that Cellini and the young employee have to face. Cellini is likably uncertain about his life and his profession, and it will be interesting to hear further about him. But A Murder in Tuscany was a bit too slow for me, a bit of a sophomore slump after her first book, which was a bit livelier.

The last of Harry Hole?

I don't know whether Phantom is meant to be the last of Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole series, but (without giving away any of the plot) it certainly has a elegaic air. A number of incidents and people (living and dead) from previous novels (at least the ones that have been translated) are referred to in passing, and Harry seems to be toching a lot of bases, as if for the last time.

The plot is complicated, with lots of clues and red herrings concerning what's actually going on. And there are lots of cliffhangers along the way (in typical Nesbø fashion), some of which are resolved in ways that strain credulity. But Nesbø has always stretched reality when it suits him, perhaps to the breaking point in The Leopard in particular. here, the parts that are a bit difficult to swallow are just credible enough that you want to look them up somehow, to see if they might just be possible.

Harry returns from Hong Kong but not as a cop. He uses his police connections to help him prove someone's innocence (I won't say who, because some of the sort-of-surprises eve at the very beginning are part of the pleasure of the story). He meets old and new enemies, old and new friends, sometimes without clear lines as to which category in which the characters should ultimately be classified.

There are some passages of bravado writing, such as we've come to expect from the best of Nesbø's books (and I still think the trilogy of The Redbreast, Nemesis, and The Devil's Star are the peak of the Harry Hole books--and please read them in the order they were written rather than the order they were translated). The Bat, the first of the Hole books, is now available in English, and we're apparently going to the the second before too long. After that, perhaps more Harry Hole (somehow) or perhaps more stand-alone books like Headhunters?

Arnaldur's new Iclandic noir

I had some doubts about Arnaldur Indridason's Black Skies when I ordered it, because it is centered on Sigurdur Óli, the least likable or interesting of the cops in the circle around Erlendur, his usual central character. Erlendur has left on a mysterious trip to the area in which he grew up (and where he lost his brother as a child), and the previous book in the series, Outrage (which focuses on Elinborg, the other running character) and Black Skies occur at the same time, with occasional overlaps as the two detectives consult with one another (and worry about Erlendur's extended absence.

I had (as it turned out, well placed) confidence in Arnaldur as a writer, though, and indeed Black Skies is very interesting. As the book explores Sigurdur Óli's life and character he first grows even less likable (without making the story less interesting). He can be a bit impulsive, and in his private life, self-destructive, traits that are given some context. He's also an unrepentant political conservative, going back to his school years (when he edited a conservative literary journal). He's also a bit of a fop, and his taste in clothes in addition to his character overlap just a bit with one of the great characters if Scandinavian crime fiction, Gunvald Larsson (of the Sjöwall/Wahlöö books). Sigurdur Óli is, though, less vocal and violent.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Black Skies is the use of overlapping plots. It's a common strategy to start off with a crime, then shift to another crime that eventually gives way to or becomes connected to that initial scene. Arnaldur plays with that theme here, setting up a gruesome scene that only very gradually comes into focus, while Sigurdur Óli concentrates on other things: primarily a mess he gets into when doing a favor for a friend. When he goes to a couple's apartment (after the friend begs him to scare them into giving up a blackmail attempt) he finds the woman in the couple almost dead, and runs into the assailant. To say more would be spoiling things. The blackmail plot, though, leads in very interesting directions before coming to a surprising conclusion.

One of the interesting directions is an investigation of the Icelandic banking practices that will (not long after the timeframe of the novel) lead to the crash of the country's economy (the book is set just before, but was written just after, the crisis). The ominous shadows of the crash loom over the book.

But the story is not an economic tract: it's aim is both broader, in terms of the society, and narrower, in terms of its vivid portrait of the detective and the numerous characters involved in the story's various threads. Though I'm particularly attracted to Erlendur throughout the series, and though the book focusing on Elinborg was very good, I think perhaps Black Skies is one of Arnaldur's best books (high praise indeed).

Martin Limon, The Joy Brigade

The 9th of Martin Limon's novels set in and around a U.S. Army base in South Korea is quite different from the others, so firmly linked into the series. The 8th novel ended with a cliff-hanger that leads directly into The Joy Brigade, which itself ends with a scene that clearly leads to a sequel.

Army cop George Sueño is on his way to North Korea as the story opens, without his regular partner (who only appears late in the book). George is on a secret mission related to his discovery of possible tunnels under the DMZ and of the location of his former lover, now in the North. What follows is much more an adventure novel than a mystery or a police-procedural, and it's a good example of that style of story. There are some spots that strain credulity (but then that's a basic element of the adventure genre, right?).

George's plan for infiltrating the North falls apart right away, and he's constantly on the run, just ahead of one sort of threat or another, aided from time to time by more or less sympathetic citizens of the North. Limon gives a convincing portrait of the contrast between the grim lives of the ordinary citizens and the privileged situation of the party members and the army. The book's title refers to a brigade of women recruited into prostitution for those privileged classes, in a militarized fashion typical of everything else in the country.

There are a few spots where George's escape from danger seem pretty unlikely (I won't go into detail for fear of spoiling the fun), but the most unlikely part of the story to me is the relative ease with which a foreigner obviously of Western rather than Eastern ethnicity (even in disguise and with false documents) navigates the society in his mission and his escape. Limon has an explanation, which seems logical, if not quite convincing.

So I'd recommend The Joy Brigade to fans of the series, to fans of adventure novels, and to anyone interested in this fictional glimpse of life in the North (quite different from the other crime series set in North Korea, by a former Western intelligence officer who uses the pseudonym James Church).

Brian McGilloway, The Nameless Dead

The lead characters in crime fiction series tend to have certain fixed and dominant traits that are a shorthand and a constant, providing capsule descriptions of his/her character and continuity through the series. The character may be more complex than the shorthand description, as with Wallander, for example: yet Wallander remains the melancholy detective, useless in his relationships with women. In lesser series, the shorthand is pretty much the whole characterization of the "hero."

Brian McGilloway's series featuring Garda Inspector Ben Devlin, on the other hand, takes no shortcuts. Davlin is a fully realized person, in his professional and personal lives, and is no more summarizable than someone you might meet on the street. The "fullness" of the character is echoed in the "roundness" of all the secondary characters, as well as the distinctly local/regional quality of the voices of all the characters, and the natural quality of the plotting. The result is a novel fully satisfying as a crime novel, or simply as a novel.

In this, the fifth Devlin novel, a Commission is digging for the graves of the "disappeared," people who are almost certainly dead but whose bodies had been hidden during the Troubles, along the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. The Commission, part of a "truth and reconciliation" process, requires that no investigation or prosecution can be made on evidence uncovered in the dig, in order to encourage people to identify the sites where corpses might be found. The layers of Irish history are uncovered along with the layers of earth on a small island in a river between the Republic and the North, with Devlin present as an observer.

When the body of s deformed child is discovered, rather than that of the young man for whom the diggers are looking, several new layers are added to the story. The first is the burial of unbaptised babies, consigned to limbo by the Catholic Church and buried secretly in unconsecrated ground by the parents, in unofficial graveyards such as the one located on the island--but the baby's body is not found in that section of the island, and was buried more recently, as well as likely being murdered rather than being stillborn or dying of natural causes.

The story is complex, but McGilloway is skillful in keeping things moving and keeping things straight for the reader. There's the family of the man whose body is being sought, including the son born after the man's disappearance, bitter that his father will receive no justice even if he is found. There are the nearby ghost estates, condemned to remain mostly empty when developers abandoned them after the Celtic Tiger collapsed. There is the duality of the two mostly cooperating police forces, along with Jim Hendry, Devlin's colleague on the other force. There is Devlin's own family, undergoing both the normal strains of having two children at the cusp and the full flower of adolescence in the house, as well as more particular strains having to do with prior events and ongoing unfortunate (from Devlin's point of view) relationships, straining the Inspector's relationship with his children and also his wife (though the marriage is pretty solid by this time in the series).

So the complexity of the characters is mirrored by the complexity of the plot, but the story and the region's history are always at the forefront, never lost in the fog. I've enjoyed this series all along, but The Nameless Dead balances all the elements of the series and its setting particularly well: I think it's the best so far.

Polish noir: Zygmunt Miloszewski's second

A Grain of Truth, Zygmunt Miloszewski's second crime novel featuring Polish prosecutor Teodore Szacki (published by Bitter Lemon and translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones), is, like the first book in the series (Entanglement) a satisfying combination of police procedural and mystery novel, with considerable humor and social commentary added in. Szacki has left Warsaw for the small city of Sandomierz, seduced by its beauty but now regretting his separation from Warsaw's urbane pleasures as well as his ex-wife and estranged daughter.

But he finally gets a good murder to sink his teeth into: a well-known woman, wife of a town councillor and herself a promoter of educational theater, is found with her throat slashed just outside a former synagogue (now a state archive). Near the body is found a kind of knife used by kosher butchers, raising the long and continuing history of Polish anti-semitism as well as the country's new liberalism (what if the murderer is in fact Jewish?).

The development of the story and the investigation of the crime develop slowly at first, ultimately shifting into underground tunnels, attack dogs, and multiple murders that veer toward the Gothic and the conspiratorial excesses of Dan Brown (who is mentioned) but ultimately Miloszewski succeeds in accessing the energies of those genres within a contemporary realism that is convincing and satisfying. Plus there's ultimately a twist that will satisfy the fans of the puzzle mystery.

There are profuse references to popular culture, mostly from outside Poland, though there are many references to a Polish TV mystery series filmed in Sandomierz, Father Mateusz, which seems to be a remake of the long-running Italian series, Don Matteo (complete with bicycle and gentle non-threatening plotting. Mateusz provides a contrast for the grittier reality of Szacki's life.

While Miloszewski explores anti-semitism and its history in depth, he leaves unexamined a flaw in his own character that keeps him human but also may irritate some readers. His language, especially in his interior monologues, can be unpleasantly sexist. But he genuinely regrets the actions on his part that destroyed his marriage, and his almost painfully comic blunders with his current love life provide evidence that the author is an intentional character flaw rather than unconscious prejudice (though the flaw may temper a reader's sympathy for Szacki's difficulties with the women in his life).

Both of Miloszewski's novels are complex, involving, and interesting, but A Grain of Truth is more satisfying as a crime story than Entanglement, and the use of history, conspiracy, and the extended range of crime fiction are livelier. Entanglement relies more on the locked-room mystery and the gathering of suspects together in a room, both being longstanding elements of the genre, but tending toward static rather than dynamic plotting. A Grain of Truth shifts toward the dynamic side of crime writing, though still with considerable care in development and careful attention to the voices of all the characters, including the difficult but engaging prosecutor himself.

Seven Days, Deon Meyer

While all of Deon Meyer's crime novels (mostly set in and around Cape Town, South Africa) are related in a daisy-chain fashion, Seven Days is a direct sequel to another recent Meyer book, Thirteen Hours. The cast of both is pretty much the same, detective Captain Benny Griessel of the elite "Hawks" squad and the professional and personal associations around him. In addition, the novels are linked by the time-frame of the titles and the time and setting of the second novel, which closely follows the first. For some reason the novel's title is 7 Days in the U.K. and Seven Days in the U.S., in the editions brought out by Hodder & Stoughton and Atlantic Monthly Press. In both cases, the translator is K.L. Seegers, who does an excellent job of making the language fluid and clear while at the same time giving a flavor of the local mix of dialects and cultures (there's a glossary at the back, but it's really not necessary once you get into the flow of the text).

This time Benny, a recovering alcoholic, and his colleagues are confronted with a two-track investigation. A sniper is shooting cops and says he will go on shooting one each day (at first only wounding them) until a recently closed cold case is re-opened and solved. So Benny is assigned the cold case, concerning the murder of a young female lawyer in her own house, and Mbali Kaleni, a "star" of Thirteen Hours, is assigned the sniper case. There are many other detectives and police officials involved, and Meyer does an excellent job of portraying each, including his flaws, and relating their characters to the story.

Meyer is here in his police-procedural (rather than thriller) mode, and it's a genre that he is comfortable with. It's not a puzzle, it's a process, and as the team follows leads (a lot of them false) from communists and the Russian mafia to policement and politicians, Griessel agonizes over the slow pace and his own (in his mind) incompetence. Meanwhile, his is struggling with his family and a new responsibility/relationship with another alcoholic, a singer first met in Thirteen Hours. Kaleni is dealing with demons of her own, not only her difficulty being accepted as a colleague by many of her fellow cops (because of her gender and figure) but also because of a rumor regarding a possible scandal that occurred while she was on a training detail in Amsterdam.

The murder case is vivid and the character and life of the victim is gradually revealed in complex detail, while the sniper case provides narrative drive and an occasional glimpse of what's happening from the sniper's point of view. This is an excellent ensemble story, though clearly focused on Griessel above all. I first discovered Meyer's books in a second-hand bookshop in Cape Town in 2001, and was first attracted to his work by a tourist's interest in the city. But I'm grateful for the author's rise to international prominence, because it has made it possible to keep reading his books for Meyer's high quality of writing and the compelling nature of his stories, as well as the continuing glimpses of the developing, complex portrait of life in today's South Africa

Invisible Murder, Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis

The first book by Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis, The Boy in the Suitcase, was among the best international crime fiction of recent years, and I was grateful when SoHo Press sent me a review copy of the sequel, Invisible Murder. Kaaberbøl translated the first book herself, but this time the translation into English is by Tara Chace, who also did a great job. The prose is clear and moves along very well.

Invisible Murder is almost as good as the first book--I say "almost" because one of the pleasures of The Boy in the Suitcase was discovering who the main character was going to be, among the plethora of characters vying for attention. Nina Borg, a Red Cross nurse, hardly seemed the most likely and it is to the authors' credit that she takes and holds the center of the story very well (as she continues to do in the second book). I have a bit of a quibble with the ending, something other reviewers have mentioned, but only in that after the vivid story up to that point, the end is a bit flat.

The book begins in Hungary, where two boys seeking salvage find a way into a sealed hospital abandoned by the Soviet Union at the end of their occupation of Hungary. We see little of what they find there, but the whole story flows from their discovery. One of the boys, a Roma, has a half-brother who's studying law in the capital, and we follow him, partly from his point of view, throughout the story (the narration is third-person).

In Copenhagen, Nina, who has promised her husband not to volunteer for the asylum network (which got her into trouble in the first novel) while he is away on an oil platform at sea. But she gets a call asking her to help some sick Roma children living in an abandoned garage. When she arrives and tries to offer medical assistance, she is rebuffed and threatened. But her attempts to help the children bring her story and that of the half-Roma law student toward each other.

No more plot details: the reader will have figured out what's going on long before Nina or a police officer who also occupies a good deal of the narrative--it's one of those books that make you want to shake the characters and yell at them to make them understand what's going on. But the authors keep them in the dark in very convincing ways. A reader might also want to grab Nina and tell her to pay more attention to her family: Nina's family life is an integral part of the story and is the focus of the most effective parts of the ending.

Kaaberbøl and Friis have created not only one of the best new crime series, but also one of the most unusual, in terms of the characters, the plots, and the way the crimes are integrated into the story. Their two books so far available in English elevate the crime fiction genre as a whole and are unique among Scandinavian noir (at least in what's available in translation) for the credibility and intensity of the stories.

Unwanted, by Kristina Ohlsson

Kristina Ohlsson's first novel, translated as Unwanted in English, takes some interesting angles on the standard police procedural. At the beginning, the leader of the investigative team, Alex Recht, seems to be the main character. But gradually the reader's interest and the motion of the plot shift to another person, Fredrika Bergman, who is a civilian academic working on the police team (judging from a couple of recent Swedish crime stories, this must be common in Sweden). Recht and his younger assistant, Peder Rydh (who is in his own mind the ace detective of the unit, at least at the beginning) discount Fredrika's abilities because of her civilian status as well as plain old sexism.

In fact, one of the interesting characteristics of the novel is the abuse, mental as well as physical, exerted by almost all the men in their personal relationships. Partly, this aspect of the book is a generator of red herrings, since the person they are tracking is clearly an abuser of women. But it seems to be a deeper point, made more subtly than in the Dragon Tattoo books, about men's attitudes, even in the supposedly enlightened land of the midnight sun.

The story begins with the disappearance of a young girl from a Stockholm-bound train, while her mother is distracted by a phone call. The husband and father is immediately and obviously the main suspect, with only Fredrika willing to keep her mind cracked open enough to see other leads that need to be followed up (and there is some obvious telegraphing of the plot as the story shifts over to her point of view--plainly she's going to be proved right at some point). There is also a large plot point that will be quite obvious to the reader long before anyone, even Fredrika, figures it out. But the procedural format frequently includes that sort of dramatic irony, so I don't really fault the novel on that point. Karen at Eurocrime makes the point that Alex, supposedly a star on the police force (at least he is in Peder's mind) doesn't really demonstrate anything that would give him that status--he's as dense as Peder most of the time.

The English title refers to a word written on his victims by the perpetrator of the crimes; the Swedish title, Askungar, actually means, literally, "ash children," or "Cinderellas" and both words have resonance in the plot. In English, though, Cinderellas would have been a misleading title, at least here in the land of Disney. The UK. cover, showing a young woman's face, is certainly apt, but the U.S. cover, showing the same red shoes as the original Swedish cover (though in a different design) has an interesting relationship to the story that's missing from the U.K. cover--one might think they refer obliquely to the young kidnap victim's shoes, abandoned on the train, but they don't, and the misdirection makes their actual significance more interesting.

I liked Unwanted, though it's perhaps not as good overall as a book I was reading at about the same time (the newly translated Nina Borg book, Invisible Murder, but Kaberbøl and Friis, which is difficult to compete with) but it's a good sign that a first novel by a Swedish crime writer has been translated very soon after its original appearance in Sweden: more please, not only of Ohlsson but of other new Scandinavian crime writers (and in the order of their original publication, please).

Donna Leon's Non-Brunetti

I received a digital copy of Donna Leon's new novel, The Jewels of Paradise, from NetGalley and began reading it without having any prior knowledge of the book or its history. For a while, I kept expecting Commissario Brunetti to pop up somehow, but gradually I figured out that it's her first non-Brunetti novel. It's part of a larger project on which she collaborated, dealing with a production of Baroque opera (which is in fact her real interest in art and life).

The story is a novelty in one other sense, her main character and the person through whom we see nearly everything is a woman, an Italian native who has been pursuing an academic career outside Venice for a number of years and is tempted back to her native city by an offer of a temporary job, assessing the papers of a lesser-known Italian composer of the Baroque era.

She quickly becomes embroiled in a web of family and greed that readers will recognize from the Brunetti books: Leon's view of contemporary Italian society is unromantic. But the primary intrigue is what she finds out about the composer's life through his papers. Leon has used an actual composer (I won't give his name because part of the intrigue at the beginning of the book is whose papers are being researched and why). There are crimes in the book, though mostly in the composer's life, as he struggled with personal, religious, and political situations beyond the scope of his musical career. The resolution of the book in the present day grows organically from that nexus of the composer's interests.

I found the book to be fascinating, and the research intriguing. It's not a thriller or even, in the usual sense, a mystery or a crime novel. But there is plenty of tension, and the satirical impulses evident in Leon's other books are deployed even more here. It's also interesting to see what Leon can do when freed from the usual structure and cast of characters. I read the book on an iPod Touch, and it's a testament to the story and to the quality of the writing that I didn't feel any strain at all in reading the novel on such a small screen.