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Hour of the Wolf, one of Håkan Nesser's Chief Inspector Van Veeteren series, isn't new (the English translation appeared three years ago) but is only reaching Kindle format in the upcoming months (which is the impetus for my current review). the Van Veeteren books are set in a fictional "Maardam," something like Ed McBain's fictional Isola. Maardam is an amalgam of northern European countries, with place and family names that suggest Holland, Germany, Belgium, and Denmark (oddly, nothing sounds very Swedish except for some cultural references--perhaps in the author's original Swedish text, Swedish names wouldn't have sounded "alien" enough to create the sense of a new place/no place. Another distinctive feature of the series is that the central character, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, retires to help run an antiquarian bookstore, early in the series. Hour of the Wolf is a first-class police procedural, with the team of detectives taking center st...

Charles McCarry, The Mulberry Bush Mysterious Press Charles McCarry’s well regarded spy fiction is noted for the clarity and assurance with which he depicts not only the spy trade but also the them-or-us oppositions of historical and cold-war espionage (not for him the gray areas of LeCarre’s maze of spies and counter-spies). But his new stand-alone The Mulberry Bush (not a part of the multi-generational saga of must of his spy fiction) starts in full post-Cold-War mode, with the unnamed narrator and central character cultivating a spy in Argentina who is providing useless information about long-retired revolutionaries. But almost immediately the story shifts into another mode, one that has less in common with the range of current spy fiction and more in common with one of the classics of American intelligence, Roger Hall’s World War II era memoir You’re Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger . McCarry has drawn a portrait of the training of intelligence agents that I rec...

Under the Channel, by Gilles Pétel, joins a number of recently translated French crime novels with a decidedly quirky tone and structure, by writers such as Jean-Patrick Manchette and Pascal Garnier. But Pétel's story is a police procedural that has little interest in the police or procedure. Under the Channel starts with a murder and moves quickly to a police investigation, but it's really about something else. Lieutenant Roland Desfeuilleres is the officer in charge, after the bungled discovery of a body on the Channel-Tunnel train from London to Paris. The reader has witnessed the victim's progress through his last day in London and the first part of his train journey in the first chapter. An English couple upon discovering the corpse in a first-class seat sets off a comedy of errors among train staff and police at the Paris station, a situation that Roland must confront along with the disastrous dissolution of his marriage. Seemingly to escape Paris and his wife, he tra...