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The fourth of Jan Costin Wagner's German-language, Finland-set crime novels featuring detective Kimmo Joentaa was published in Anthea Bell's English translation this year. Wagner is married to a Finnish woman and spends part of the year there, and his familiarity with the country is obvious in the novels. Like its predecessors, Light in a Dark House is meditative rather than propulsive in terms of its pacing. There is a good deal of repetition of the major themes (Joentaa's deceased wife Sanna, a major aspect of the series, but some new ones here as well), in a more poetic than strictly narrative style. For me, the moody pace works, but it could be frustrating for some readers. The new novel picks up a thread from the previous book, Joentaa's relationship with a prostitute who showed up at his house, refused to give her real name (calling herself Larissa), and disappears periodically. At the beginning of this book, after Joentaa has been assigned the case of a comatose ...

The first two of Quentin Bates's crime novels featuring detective Gunnhildur Gisladottir (Gunna) were perched on the edge of and at the beginning of the financial crash that Iceland endured in recent years. The third, Chilled to the Bone, is in the midst of the suffering caused by the collapse--but not everyone is suffering equally. Gunna, now running a major crimes squad in Reykjavik, is a likable and normal character, with her own private worries and dramas--but she's neither an action heroine nor a damaged noir detective. She comes across to the reader as a real person. At the beginning of the new book, Gunna arrives at a hotel to find the body of a middle-aged gentleman, tied to the bed naked and dead. From there, the story progresses on parallel tracks following the investigation and the private and professional lives of two new characters, one a very interesting new character, Hekla, a thief of a very particular sort who is supporting her disabled husband and her children...

I'm reading a galley (which I bought rather than receiving it from the publisher, full disclosure) of Leif GW Persson's Free Falling, As if in a Dream, the third volume in Persson's series dealing with the murder of Olaf Palme (and also part of a longer-running series featuring a duo of Stockholm cops, Jarnebring and Johannson). There's a phenomenon we don't see much in the U.S. but is common in Europe of turning crime series into TV series, and some of the series are so good that there's a temptation to think there's no "need" to read the book after seeing the show that it was based on. Free Falling and its two predecessors were made into an excellent 4-part series in Sweden, under the name En pilgrims död, or The Death of a Pilgrim, starring Ralf Lassgård as Johansson. I recently read a Kindle-only translation of Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano's First Case (a novella, really, that I think was published in the original Italian as part of a ...

The Dead Season is the third of Christobel Kent's four (so far) crime novels featuring private detective (and former cop) Sandro Cellini of Florence. The series has always been rather moody, with a sort of late-in-life melancholy about the main character, and the mood is used to good advantage in The Dead Season. Also much in evidence is the season: the heat of Florence in August has driven away all the residents who can afford to leave for the seaside or the mountains, and what's left is the tourists and people who can't leave (or haven't left yet). This is a novel with multiple strands that develop slowly, and as the strands draw together, picks up speed considerably until a convergence that isn't quite what the reader has been expecting. Cellini's assistant, former junky Giulli, has brought in a client who probably can't pay: an 8-months pregnant immigrant, working as a maid in a down-at-heels hotel. Her fiancé and the father of her baby has disappeared. ...

The crime fiction and crime blogging communities were dismayed recently to hear of the death of Leighton Gage, whose 7th novel featuring Chief Inspector Mario Silva of the Brazilian Federal Police, The Ways of Evil Men, is to be published by SoHo Press early in 2014. The final novel in the series is a fitting climax to Gage's late-blooming crime writing career, focusing onece again on a pernicious social evil (more than one, actually) as well as the lives of the policemen and civilians involved in a crime and its consequences. The story begins with the almost complete annihilation of an indigenous tribe in the Brazilian jungle: only a hunter and h is son, away from the village at the time of the genocide, survive. Jade, a young woman who is the local agent of the agency tasked with the protection of the indigenous peoples (FUNAI) attempts to bring the murders to the attention of the police but no one in the remote town or its provincial city is interested in the deaths of "som...