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Helsinki Homicide: Darling

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I haven't read all of Jarkko Sipila's Helsinki Homicide series, but the current one (Darling, translated ably by Katriina Kitchens) is focused less on  Detective Lieutenant Kari Takamӓki than on his team (in comparison to the ones I have read). The result is very good, right up to the end (which I found a bit rushed and a bit more brutal in a casual way than anything that had come before). I kept thinking of Ed McBain and the 87th Precinct books, in the way that Sipila handles the shifting point of view and the broadened focus on the characters. The cops are interesting and well differentiated from one another, and along the way another interesting character, defense attorney Nea Lind, also becomes an important aspect of the story. The plotting is also off-beat in an interesting way. When a mentally handicapped adult woman is found dead, the police focus in on a group of men (including the caretaker in her apartment building) who hang out together in the Alamo Bar; each in turn...
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Sjöwall & Wahlöö, The Locked Room

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I was a big fan of the Maj Sjowall/Per Wahlöö Martin Beck novels when they were first translated in the 1970s in the U.S., and at the time my favorite was The Locked Room, the 8th of the 10 books. I had reread all of them a few years ago, but recently had occasion to listen to the audio version of The Locked Room recently and was surprised how funny it is (at least when listened to)--sometimes int he ironic way that all the Martin Beck books are funny, but also in a broad comic way. This is one of the most tendentious books in the series, in terms of its indictment of the Swedish so-called "welfare state" of the time, with the narrator occasionally veering into invective against the injustice and neglect that elsehwere is effectively potrahed in the crimes, victims, and even criminals (sometimes) in the series. The set-up is straightforward: A woman proceeds toward a bank in Stockholm, robs it, and kills a bystander almost by accident. The reader will not revisit this bank-ro...
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A Few Drops of Blood, Jan Merete Weiss

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The second volume of Jan Merete Weiss's series featuring Carabiniere Captain Natalia Monte (and set in Naples) is embedded in the life in the streets of the city and in the troubled social history of the region. In the first book of the series, Monte goes underground (literally, into the catacombs, as well as figuratively) jbut in the second, she is immersed in the light of day (though it may not illuminate much). The story begins with a gruesome crime, two naked, murdered men discovered on the back of a sculpted horse in the garden of a wealthy Neapolitan widow. Natalia and her new partner, a young woman from Sicily, pursue the crime in a fairly straightforward way, through the art, gossip, and gay circles of the city, and at a certain point get derailed into a different kind of story altogehter: one in which conventional law and morality are not at the center. The murders may have something to do with a vendetta that involves not only the Camorra but also the intertwined stories ...
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