What is it with Sweden and mysteries, eh? And it’s not just Henning Mankell. (Btw, I found the English-language televised version of Mankell’s mysteries, Wallander — which debuted last weekend — a bit disappointing.) Other Swedish authors just keep pumping out dark, dramatic, literary page-turners populated with unforgettable characters.
One of these authors is Hakan [...]
Now You’re One of Us, a thriller new in paperback from bestselling Japanese novelist Asa Nonami (and translated into English by Michael Volek and Mitsuko Volek), starts off so strong. Against her mother’s wishes, attractive if somewhat naive young Noriko has just married the eldest son in a strange family that lives in a large [...]
An apparent ritual slaughter in an historic Parisian church, with gory bits scattered around the altar, blood seeping into the fifteenth-century stone and a hunky but deep and emotionally vulnerable forensic sleuth scouring the scene ten years later for clues — so is there a new wave of Catholic-France-related murder mysteries or what? May paces [...]
A Canadian interior designer in France’s romantic, castle-studded Dordogne region hunts for her twin sister, who disappeared twenty years previous without a trace while hunting for orchids. It’s a teensy bit predictable, but Wan’s careful attention to character development makes this mystery novel fairly chewy beach reading for those with a penchant for flowers, France, [...]
The day a full colostomy bag figures prominently in the plot of a mystery novel is the day when you realize that mysteries have reached a whole new kind of high-water mark — which is where they should have been all along, in the graphic land of guts and gurgling noises. Nothing’s cute or cozy [...]
Fundamentalist Christians — in Sweden? Not just that, but Lapland, in this deeply felt character-driven mystery that starts with the partial dismemberment of a preacher and sends a smart Stockholm lawyer back to her snowy hometown. Larsson gets deep inside the heads of even minor characters who pop up only once in the narrative and [...]