Ghana’s most celebrated women’s fashion designer has been murdered in her bed, and the police investigation has, as is so often the case, gone awry. Lacking even a shred of evidence, they’ve arrested and imprisoned without trial Lady Araba’s driver and prevented the police lab from analyzing DNA gathered at the scene. Months later, Lady […]
Continue Reading...The Abominable Man may be the best of the ten Martin Beck novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. It’s certainly the best of the six I’ve read to date. In this, the first Nordic noir series, the left-wing couple routinely explores the disruptive changes overcoming Swedish society in the 1960s and 70s. The police […]
Continue Reading...Irish wordsmith John Banville has won the Booker Prize and torrents of praise for the richly textured prose of his novels. He has also written a series of seven historical mysteries set in 1950s Dublin that feature a man named Quirke, the town’s coroner, who spends far more time solving crimes than conducting autopsies. To […]
Continue Reading...American-Irish actor and author Tana French gained prominence in literary circles with the six bestselling Dublin Murder Squad novels. Justly so. The books display the magical charm of her writing and the scope of her understanding of human psychology. But formulas sometimes lose their charm for both writers and readers, and it seems that’s the […]
Continue Reading...Why did the Soviet Union implode and the Berlin Wall crumble overnight? For many conservative Americans, the answer is Ronald Reagan. But level-headed analysts have debunked that thesis. In fact, the roots of the crisis that came to a head in the fall of the USSR lay deep in Soviet society. And Edgar Award-winning mystery […]
Continue Reading...From 2007 to 2010, Welsh author Matt Rees published the four novels of the Palestine Quartet. The first, The Collaborator of Bethlehem, introduces schoolteacher and would-be detective Omar Yussef. It was an outstanding debut for the series that followed—an unconventional but entirely convincing picture of the Palestinian Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000-5). Drawing on his many years […]
Continue Reading...Set in the USSR not long after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Death of a Dissident paints a savage if all too credible picture of life in Moscow early in the final decade of Communist rule. If you enjoy historical fiction and have a hankering to understand the lies, compromises, and inefficiencies that led to […]
Continue Reading...This is not a book for the faint of heart. In the course of its two hundred pages, the body count mounts again and again. In the end, I counted twenty-seven dead. Now, perhaps that’s to be expected in a novel about the Rwanda genocide, when more than a million perished. But it seems a […]
Continue Reading...Now, we’ve known all along that IQ, more formally known as Isaiah Quintabe, is supremely talented at making trouble for himself and practically everyone around him. But in Hi Five, the fourth of the novels in the series, he outdoes himself. In the space of 352 pages, Isaiah manages to infuriate a psychopathic arms dealer, […]
Continue Reading...Why do you read mysteries and thrillers? For me, the answer’s simple. I read them as much for the light they shed on society as for the suspense and the intellectual satisfaction of seeing a mystery solved. That’s particularly true in the case of historical novels and of stories that take place in unfamiliar settings. […]
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