Mysteries Recent Picks

March 2011

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Bad intentions / Karin Fossum ; translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund.
"In the wake of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling novels, readers are discovering the rich trove of modern Scandinavian crime fiction. If you’ve devoured the Millennium trilogy and are looking for your next read, Karin Fossum and her bone-chillingly bleak psychological thrillers have won the admiration of the likes of Ruth Rendell and Colin Dexter (of Inspector Morse fame). In Bad Intentions, the newest installment in the Inspector Sejer series since The Water’s Edge in 2009, Konrad Sejer must face down his memories and fears as he struggles to determine why the corpses of troubled young men keep surfacing in local lakes. The first victim, Jon Moreno, was getting better. His psychiatrist said so, and so did his new friend at the hospital, Molly Gram, with her little-girl-lost looks. He was racked by a mysterious guilt that had driven him to a nervous breakdown one year earlier. But when he drowns in Dead Water Lake, Sejer hesitates to call it a suicide. Then another corpse is found in a lake, a Vietnamese immigrant. And Sejer begins to feel his age weigh on him. Does he still have the strength to pursue the elusive explanations for human evil?." (Amazon.com)

The sleepwalkers / Paul Grossman.
"Grossman’s atmospheric debut joins the already bulging list of mysteries set in 1930s Germany. Like Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther, Grossman’s Willi Krauss is a hard-boiled police detective in Berlin who scorns the brownshirts cavorting about his city. But Grossman ups the ante by making Willi a Jew, albeit a famous detective who cracked the sensational Child Eater case and thereby earned himself a degree of immunity from the power-grabbing Nazis. It’s 1932, and Hitler’s noose is tightening when Willi draws another headline-making case: random women, including a Bulgarian princess, have been disappearing from Berlin. The closer Willi comes to cracking the case—the women are all connected to a celebrity hypnotist performing at one of the city’s outré nightclubs—the closer he comes to wearing out his tenuous welcome with the Nazis. Like Kerr, Jonathan Rabb, Craig Nova, and Rebecca Cantrell, Grossman makes the most of the Weimar setting, but his moody thriller breaks little new ground in an already crowded field. Still, for those who can’t get enough of Nazi noir, it delivers the goods." (Amazon.com)

The cruel ever after / Ellen Hart.
"At the start of Hart's delightful 18th mystery starring Minneapolis restaurateur Jane Lawless (after 2009's The Mirror and the Mask), Jane's charismatic ex-husband and antiquities dealer, Chester "Chess" Garrity, wakes up one morning with a hangover outside the house of Melvin Dial, an art collector to whom he'd offered to sell a valuable Iraqi artifact, the Winged Bull of Nimrud, the night before. After finding Dial dead of a knife wound inside the house, Chess flees. When he returns to the crime scene with fellow dealer Irina Nelson, he discovers the body gone and a note clearly addressed to him demanding ,000 in small bills along with incriminating photos. Arrested for Dial's murder, Chess must turn to Jane, who has more than enough on her plate already, for help. Buttressed by distinctive characters and a splendid Minnesota setting, the well-constructed plot builds to a satisfying conclusion." (Publishers weekly)

Ashes to dust / by Yrsa Sigurdardottir ; translated by Philip Roughton.
"Thóra peered at the floor, but couldn’t see anything that could have frightened Markús that much, only three mounds of dust. She moved the light of her torch over them. It took her some time to realize what she was seeing— and then it was all she could do not to let the torch slip from her hand. ‘Good God,’ she said. She ran the light over the three faces, one after another. Sunken cheeks, empty eye-sockets, gaping mouths; they reminded her of photographs of mummies she’d once seen in National Geographic. ‘Who are these people?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Markús...Bodies are discovered in one of the excavated houses at a volcanic tourist attraction dubbed 'The Pompeii of the North'. Markús Magnússon, who was only a teenager when the volcano erupted, falls under suspicion and hires attorney Thóra Gudmundsdottir to defend him - but when his childhood sweetheart is murdered his case starts to look more difficult, and the locals seem oddly reluctant to back him up.. The third crime novel from international bestseller Yrsa Sigurdardottir, and the third featuring her popular heroine Thora, ASHES TO DUST is tense, taut and terrifying." (Amazon.co.uk)

The fallen angel / David Hewson.
"Acclaimed author David Hewson returns with this mesmerizing new thriller featuring Nic Costa and the detectives of Rome’s Questura. This time Costa must solve a case with roots buried deep in one of the ancient city’s most infamous episodes—a story of incest, murder, and martyrdom.
It’s August in Rome, and Nic Costa’s vacation is about to be cut short by a scream, a girl covered in blood, and a man lying dead in the Via Beatrice Cenci. It seems that Malise Gabriel, a scholar with an impressive list of enemies, stepped onto faulty scaffolding for a cigarette and fell to his death. On the surface, it’s no more than an unfortunate accident. But the deeper Costa looks—into the facts that don’t add up, into the haunted eyes of Gabriel’s beautiful daughter, Mina, and into the mysterious links between the present and the past—the more he’s haunted by disturbing parallels with a centuries-old crime: In 1599, Beatrice Cenci was beheaded by the Vatican for murdering her father, a man known for unthinkable sexual crimes. Does Mina’s obsession with Beatrice intimate her own family’s dark secrets, or is someone using her as a smoke screen for a far deadlier plan? Soon another body is discovered and Nic comes to doubt his own first impressions. Something evil is circling Mina, her angry and silent mother, her runaway brother, and her family’s checkered history in England, the United States, and Italy. And now that something is closing in fast for the kill. In a novel that captures modern Rome in all its complexity, as well as its history of beauty and barbarity, genius and blindness, The Fallen Angel is David Hewson at his best—a twisting and twisted contest between innocence and evil." (Amazon.com)

Oscar Wilde and the nest of vipers / Gyles Brandreth.
"The fourth of Gyles Brandreth's acclaimed series of Victorian murder mysteries, Oscar Wilde and the Nest of Vipers opens in the spring of 1890 at a glamorous reception hosted by the Duke and Duchess of Albemarle. All London's haut monde is there, including the Prince of Wales, who counts the Albemarles as close friends. Although it is the first time Oscar and Bertie have met, Oscar seems far more interested in Rex LaSalle, a young actor, who disarmingly claims to be a vampire...However, what begins as a diverting evening ends in tragedy. As the guests are leaving, the Duchess is found murdered, two tiny puncture marks in her throat. No one has entered the house; no one has left. Desperate to avoid another scandal, the Prince of Wales asks Oscar to investigate the crime. What he discovers threatens to destroy the very heart of the Royal Family...." (Amazon.com)

The inspector and silence : an Inspector Van Veeteren mystery / Hakan Nesser ; translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson.
"In the heart of summer, the country swelters in a fug of heat. In the beautiful forested lake-town of Sorbinowo, Sergeant Merwin Kluuge's tranquil existence is shattered when he receives a phone-call from an anonymous woman. She tells him that a girl has gone missing from the summer camp of the mysterious The Pure Life, a religious sect buried deep in the woods. Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is recruited to help solve the mystery. But Van Veeteren's investigations at The Pure Life go nowhere fast. The strange priest-like figure who leads the sect -Oscar Yellineck- refuses even to admit anyone is missing. Things soon take a sinister turn, however, when a young girl's body is discovered in the woods, raped and strangled; and Yellineck himself disappears. Yet even in the face of these new horrors, the remaining members of the sect refuse to co-operate with Van Veeteren, remaining largely silent. As the body count rises, a media frenzy descends upon the town and the pressure to find the monster behind the murders weighs heavily on the investigative team. Finally Van Veeteren realises that to solve this disturbing case, faced with silence and with few clues to follow, he has only his intuition to rely on..." (Amazon.com)

The burning / Jane Casey.
"The media call him The Burning Man, a brutal murderer who has beaten four young women to death, before setting their bodies ablaze in secluded areas of London’s parks. And now the fifth victim has been found… Maeve Kerrigan is an ambitious detective constable, keen to make her mark on the murder task force. Her male colleagues believe Maeve’s empathy makes her weak, but the more she learns about the latest victim, Rebecca Haworth, from her grieving friends and family, the more determined Maeve becomes to bring her murderer to justice. But how do you catch a killer no one has seen? And when so much of the evidence they leave behind has gone up in smoke?" (amazon.com)

Mark of the lion : a Jade Del Cameron mystery / Suzanne Arruda.
"Set in 1919, Arruda's promising debut introduces a heroine who's no ordinary Gibson girl. An ambulance driver during WWI, Jade del Cameron promises a dying soldier that she'll track down his brother. The only problem is that the soldier's mother, whom Jade goes to visit in London, insists that she had only one son. Jade reasons that the missing brother must have been born to another woman, conceived when the now deceased family patriarch was exploring East Africa. So off she goes to Nairobi, where she mingles with the colonial elite, kills a hyena, learns Swahili, fingers a drug smuggler, romances a man twice her age, uncovers a murder and attracts the attentions of a local witch. The novel's conclusion is a tad predictable, and Arruda's Africa is not quite as captivating as Alexander McCall Smith's (an inevitable comparison). Still, most readers will close this charming book eagerly anticipating the next installment of Jade's adventures." (Publishers Weekly)

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