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International

Review

Outside

by Henrietta Thornton

With friends like this, who needs enemies? Four buddies from college, now into early middle age, decide to get together for a mini-reunion and hike. They choose remote east Iceland—in the winter—not perhaps the most sensible decision. But Ármann, one of the group, owns a tourist company and seems to know his way around. So when they head off on the hike, with little food and no other supplies, then get caught in a blinding storm, it’s Ármann who is able to lead them to an emergency hut. But what greets them when they open up the hut is shocking, unsettling the small group. As they shelter in place and secrets are revealed, one old friend turns against another. This standalone from the best-known author of Icelandic noir makes for a fast read with as many terrifying twists and turns as the luge

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Review

Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight

by Henrietta Thornton

Aki and Hiro have decided to break up, but before they go their separate ways they agree to spend one last night together in their Tokyo apartment. A final evening for bitter-sweet lovemaking? Not with these two, who far prefer to discuss their failed relationship, from when they first met in their university’s tennis club to their decision to split. But Aki and Hiro are engaged in far more than just reminiscing. Every chapter the book switches narrator, unearthing some profoundly unsettling facts about their relationship, stretching from their painful childhoods to the death of a guide on a mountain climbing vacation they took a year ago. Is one of them responsible for his death? A bit of a thriller, a bit of a murder mystery, and entirely compelling, this literary who-dunnit is one that readers will tear through in one sitting.

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Review

Death Doesn’t Forget

by Brian Kenney

We’re back on the streets of Taipei with Jing-nan, the owner of Unknown Pleasures, a night market food stall. Taipei native Jing-nan spent a couple of years at UCLA only to be called home when his parents died, leaving him to run the take-out—a bittersweet turn of events. Here he’s initially accused of two murders: of a small-time criminal who dates his girlfriend’s mother, and of a police captain. With little effort, Jing-nan manages to worm his way out of the accusations, only—along with girlfriend Nancy, her mom, and his food-stall employees—to get sucked into the search for the real criminals. While the mystery, such as it is, chugs along on the back burner, we’re treated to Lin’s always wonderful array of characters, bits of Taiwanese history, and explanations of the current political scene—all without feeling like we’re in school. Lin is definitely a satirist, but this novel is deeply poignant at the same time. While this book can be read on its own, Lin’s books benefit from reading them in series, as so much of the writing is focused on character development.

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Review

Geiger

by Henrietta Thornton

Talk about jumping right into the thick of the story. As Skördeman’s debut opens, a wife says goodbye to her visiting daughters and grandchildren, picks up the phone, and, hearing just the word Geiger, shoots her husband in the head. We have no idea why she would do this nor where she’s headed after immediately going on the run, and what unfolds is more bizarre than we could have imagined. It’s also much weirder than the Swedish public ever thought could happen to the victim, a beloved TV presenter and jolly father figure known as Uncle Stellan. Espionage involving Sweden’s relationship with East Germany during the Cold War and after, and the relationship between Uncle Stellan’s spoiled, mean daughters and their childhood friend and bullying target Sara—now a police officer who elbows her way into the investigation—are highlights of this tale, as are the frequent head-spinning twists. Potential readers should note that child sexual abuse is a major plotline here. For fans of Elizabeth Elo’s Finding Katarina M., which also has echoes of a communist regime.

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Review

The Drowning Sea

by Henrietta Thornton

Taylor, Sarah Stewart. The Drowning Sea (Maggie D’arcy Mysteries #3). June 2022. 352p. Minotaur.
I tiptoe warily toward books set in my home country, Ireland, fearing they’ll be all priests and mist, but Taylor mines a thoroughly modern Ireland for her thoughtful tale. The setting is West Cork, long a bohemian area that attracts foreigners who like a slower way of life. Taylor shows it being overtaken by the ultra-rich while the local bad boy made good, who owns everything from the gastropub to the manor house, is building a hotel that has locals staging protests and sabotaging construction. The beauty of the area is already working against it, then, when a body washes up on the beach. He’s a member of the area’s Polish community, one of the young people who ease the lives of the rich but struggle themselves, and his death begins to scrape away the veneer of niceness on the town’s past and present. Women steer this story, starting with the series’ star, Maggie D’arcy, a Long Island police officer who’s visiting Ireland but may stay with her new boyfriend and their respective children. There is also a young Polish officer who reluctantly lets Maggie into some aspects of the investigation and an artist whose nebulous memories of a possible past crime seem related to the present-day violence. Tana French fans will love this intricate, relationship-fueled crime story and its strong women characters.

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Review

A Harmless Lie

by Brian Kenney

With its nine volumes, the acclaimed Detective Louise Rick series can be off-putting. But the newest title, A Harmless Lie, is actually a good entrance point. Sure, you’re missing plenty of backstory, but Blaedel is careful in not assuming too much knowledge on the reader’s part. Here, Louise is in Thailand, on sabbatical before returning home and taking the position of Copenhagen’s Head of Homicide, when she gets a call informing her that her brother Mikkel has been hospitalized after attempting suicide and that his wife, Trine, abandoned him and their children just days before. Louise heads off to her claustrophobic home town of Osted, only to confront a withdrawn Mikkel, her anxious parents, and the gradual realization that her brother is being investigated for Trine’s murder. Concurrently, her good friend Camilla, a journalist, is looking into the decades-old disappearance of a teen girl whose body has just been discovered, a girl who happened to be a classmate of Trine. While crawling with cops, this book is hardly a police procedural. It’s a deeply emotional dive into family, community, and the power of secrets.

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Review

Who Took Eden Mulligan

by Henrietta Thornton

Perhaps inspired by the real-life disappearance of Northern Ireland mother Jean McConville, Dempsey invites us inside two crimes. The first is a murderous attack on five roommates, and then there’s the cold case resurrected by the message scrawled on their wall: Who Took Eden Mulligan? Eden’s children, now adults, have been adamant in the decades since her disappearance that she wouldn’t leave them, but the woman was an enigmatic outsider in “a pit of savagery and subterfuge.” A Protestant living in a Catholic area of Belfast, she looked a mite too good for neighbors to care about her fate. Detective Danny Stowe has lots to lose in his inquiries—he’s on thin ice after smashing a perpetrator’s head against a wall and needs this win. For that, and more personal reasons, he persuades his best friend from college, a forensic psychologist who’s enduring her own issues, to join the investigation. The old and new cases, and the broken families involved, bring forth the weariness of living in sectarian strife, a mundanity that’s broken by moments of horror. Dempsey excels in portraying the anger that emerges when the dreamy veil of struggle lifts to reveal political violence as “a cover for psychopaths.” Read this for both a satisfying puzzle and an inside look at a culture turned sour.

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Review

The Bone Track

by Henrietta Thornton

Alexa Glock’s latest adventure (the third in a trilogy, after Molten Mud Murder and The Bones Remember) is reminiscent of the recent crop of books in which people are thrown together, or reunited, often on vacation, with a killer in their midst. But this book stands out from its plot-mates due to its unusual location and forensic-science focus. The setting is New Zealand’s (very) remote Milford Track, a real hiking trail that dispels all images of the country as hobbit-filled and quaint. Fiordland, where the Track is located, is treacherous, and the travelers face additional peril from rain-caused landslides and creeks that now have rapids. Alexa, an American who lives in New Zealand, realizes that there’s even more to fear when she finds a skeleton hidden on the trail; then a hiker is found dead and suddenly everyone looks suspicious. Vacationing with Alexa is her brother, Charlie. Their childhood misunderstandings and pain persist and are echoed in troubles revealed in the other hikers’ lives. This makes for a compelling thriller but also a thought-provoking look at how to move past hurt and find what’s important. A bonus: Johnson unobtrusively shares many details about Maori culture, New Zealand’s volcanic landscapes, and forensic science, especially involving Alexa’s fascinating specialty: dead people’s teeth.

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Review

The Harbor

by Brian Kenney

When 15-year-old Oscar Dreyer-Hoff goes missing on his way home from school, the Copenhagen police assume he’s yet another teenager who’s run off and is likely at a friend’s house. But his well-connected, affluent family thinks otherwise. They’re art dealers with a somewhat shady past and a history of receiving threats. In fact, they receive an ambiguous message the day after young Dreyer-Hoff disappears. Time to bring in detectives Jeppe Kørner and Anette Werner, who pursue Oscar’s disappearance as though it were a kidnapping. Kørner and Werner encounter a wonderful range of characters—from pouty, insolent teens to engineers in a recycling plant and the caretaker of an island in the harbor—and we learn about Copenhagen in the process. Engberg is a genius at balance, going deep into the lives of Kørner and Werner, as well as some of the suspects, while never forgetting that this is a murder mystery, and the clock is ticking. The third in a series that just keeps getting better, this book also succeeds as a standalone. For wherever Nordic noir is appreciated.

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Review

Repentance

by Brian Kenney

It’s 1981 and Inspector Joaquín Alzada has one goal: to keep his head down and avoid trouble. Not so easy when you are a cop in Buenos Aires during a period of extreme political turmoil, with Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo bearing daily witness to the thousands of citizens who have been made disappeared. But when his activist brother Jorge is among the missing, Joaquín has no choice but to use his political chips and try to save his brother. Flip to twenty years later, when Argentina is facing a serious economic crisis, with middle-class citizens going hungry and taking to the streets. Again, Joaquín’s reaction is to lie low—he’s close to retirement, after all—but circumstances won’t allow it. For one thing, the body of a woman is found, dumped near the morgue, while at the same time one of Buenos Aires’s wealthiest women has gone missing. Are they a match? Then, the twenty-something son of Jorge—raised by Joaquín and his wife—joins the protestors. Repentance isn’t so much crime fiction as it is fiction embedded in crime, and Díaz skillfully uses Joaquín’s inner voice—poignant, dryly witty, anxious—to move the narrative along. A powerful first novel that brilliantly illuminates a country, a historical period, and an individual.

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