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F ull disclosure (or perhaps bragging): SoHo Press used a blurb taken from my review of Fuminori Nakamura's previous book (The Thief) on the flyleaf of the new book (Evil and the Mask). Evil and the Mask is, like The Thief, a philsophical crime novel of the sort that both Japanese and French writers do so well. Evil and the Mask begins with an 11-year old boy being told on his birthday by his elderly and wealthy father than he is to be trained as a "cancer," aimed toward destroying those around him and society at large, and that on a subsequent birthday the father will show him hell. That beginning sets up an expectation somewhere between Mishima and Bataille, but the story follows a somewhat different path, jumping back and forth bttween the child's progress and his adult reincarnation, after surgery to change his appearance; and the story is more like Kobo Abe than Mishima, in the end. That is to say, not as perverse as the latter but as strangely straightforward as...

I'm just catching up with the newest Hal Challis/Ellen Destry book by Australia's Garry Disher (when his next, a Wyatt book, is just about to come out). Whispering Death could be the best yet among Disher's books, from whatever series. Though Destry is mostly absent (on a course prior to setting up a sex crines unit in the Peninsula of the series' setting), Pam Murphy, the younger detective and the other female in the squad, steps up to a prominent role. In fact, Pam is more involved than Challis in the investigation of a rape and abduction (and subsequent related crimes), while Challis worries about a series of bank robberies and his own problems with a failing classic car (a Triumph) and the classic airplane he's lost interest in, now that he has finished restoring it. But the book actually starts out with a fascinating new character, unrelated to the crime that the squad is investigating. A young woman who goes by many names is a skillful, careful, and sympatheti...

Rob Kitchin's new novel, Stiffed, is (to borrow Paul Cain's phrase) a fast one (and a funny one). It's a farce with guns and bodies instead of sex. Tadhg Maguire, born in Ireland but raised in a fictional New England town of modest size, wakes up one morning, hungover, to discover that instead of his girlfriend of less than a year, there is a hairy corpse in bed with him. In fact, the hairy corpse of the local crime boss's henchman. Instead of calling the cops, after being beaned by his wife, once she appears on the scene, he seeks the help of his friends in getting rid of his problem corpse. From the point, the story descends into a spiralling assortment of problems for Tadgh and his friends, a motley group of outsiders who had been their own little clique in school. Each of the friends contributes his or her own vulnerabilities and strengths to the story, along with an assorment of cops and gangsters and perhaps the most dangerous of all, Tadhg's girlfriend. In ad...

Summertime Death is the second in Mons Kallentoft's tetralogy featuring Malin Fors, a detective in the small Swedish city of Linköping. The setting of the first book, Midwinter Sacrifice, was ice cold, and this one is steamy and hot, but the books share a lot in terms of style. Both are interspersed with monologues by the murdered victims, a device that I find irritating and in this case also unnecessary. The dead people don't really advance the plot. Another stylistic quirk is the use of sentence fragments, something that I also find irritating if not done well, but Kallentoft mostly uses the fragmentary style in a positive way, to move the story rapidly along. Not to say that the story actually moves rapidly: the detectives in this case spend a lot of time spinning their wheels. But the most striking aspects of the book for me have to do with the attitudes and imaginations of the detectives. They seem fixated on immigrants and they leap to conclusions about the rape of one of...

Swedish crime novelist Leif G.W. Persson has written an etensive series of police procedurals united not by a single main character but by a revolving set of characters and a series of interrelated plots (to judge by the 3 novels so far translated into English and the two films available in the U.S..--Bo Widerberg's 1984 The Man from Mallorca, available on VHS with subtitles and En Pilgrims Död, a Swedish 4-part TV series that may or may not be available for download along with downloadable subtitles). The most recently translated novel, Linda, As in the Linda Murder, focuses on an obnozious and frequently funny minor character in some of the other works, Evert Bäckström, a short, fat, lazy, self-centered detective who has been chosen (from all of Persson's many characters) as the model for a U.S. TV series which will star Rainn Wilson of The Office. Bäckström's malign and feckless character has produced disasters and has been present (if not actually bringing about) succes...