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To her credit, Karin Fossum doesn't adhere to a formula in her series featuring Inspector Sejer, the calm, relentless Norwegian detective. In the newly translated The Murder of Harriet Krohn, Sejer and his team are almost completely offstage: Sejer himself appears toward the end in the role of interrogator. At the center of the novel, instead, is the murderer, Charlo Torp, a compulsive gambler who lost his marriage and his daughter due to that compulsion's effects on the family. Now, he has turned to theft, initially to get out of debt but finally as the basis for a redemptive gift to his daughter, but his target, the titular Harriet, doesn't cooperate. Most of the novel occurs after the murder and in flashbacks, Charlo re-envisioning his life as a reformed addict. He's not a total sociopath, there are moments of guilt. But he is so focused on his goal (to reestablish contact with his daughter) and so self-centered that the guilt and even the fear of being caught are mi...

A few short fictions by some of Italy's leading crime writers are coming into English: Andrea Camilleri's Brewer or Preston and a collection of novellas called Judges, with short works by Camiller, Carlo Lucarelli, and Giancarlo De Cataldo. The Judges collection includes Camilleri's Judge Surra, which deals with the appearance of a northern Italian judge in Montelusa and Vigata (the fictional Sicilian cities of his Montalbano series) just after the unification of Italy; Lucarelli's The Bambina, about a young female judge in Bologna during the years of violent political action that are called the anni di piombo , or years of lead; and De Cataldo's, The Triple Dream of the Prosecutor, which  concerns the lifelong conflict between two boys who grow up to be a crime boss and a prosecuting magistrate in a northern Italian town. Each of the stories has an element of comedy as well as threat. In Judge Surra, the magistrate's utter innocence regarding the ways of Sicily...

Antonin Varenne's Bed of Nails, newly translated by Siân Reynolds for Maclehose Press, is a dark, strange book. At first, it seems like a cross between Fred Vargas's Commissaire Adamsberg series and the Department Q novels by Jussi Adler-Olsen, but the story keeps going in a downward spiral darker than either of those. The setting is the Paris police's suicide squad, an assignment given to a detective that the powers-that-be want to get rid of, Guérin. The novel opens with his assistant, Lambert, showing a surveillance video of a man committing suicide by running naked along the peripheral highway outside the city--the group of cops gathered around the screen as if watching a porn video. Guérin's downfall, as well as his strength, is that he sees connections everywhere, leading him to conspiracy theories that bring all the evidence together. As Guérin and Lambert investigate the naked runner and other cases, including a fakir, a performer who dies while suspending himse...