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Bill James, author of the extensive series featuring detectives Harpur and Iles, is a master of misdirection, in both his language and his plotting. In Noose, a stand-alone novel or perhaps the start of another series, the misdirection starts with the title: though there is a hanging in the book, there are far more "nooses" that simply entrap the main character, Ian Charteris, in various personal, professional, and political commitments. The story takes place in 1950s London for the most part. The misdirection continues with the opening pages, when Ian, a freelance journalist, is sent to cover the attempted suicide of a young actress who, as it turns out, may be his own half sister. But what seems to be the start of a newspaper-based crime story turns out to be something else, and in fact the book begins at the end of the story (or ends before it begins, perhaps). Most of the book is backstory, as we see Ian's difficult family life, dominated by an Iles-like egomaniac for...

Fixi Novo, a new crime imprint in Malaysia, sent me a review copy of the first of four planned collections of KL Noir (the first volume is subtitled Red, with White to be the next volume). Red, indeed: this is a fairly bloody collection, though some of the darkness comes not from incarnated souls but disembodied ones. The introduction by editor Amir Muhammad is very helpful in positioning the stories both in a Malaysian and an international noir context (and also helpfully refers to the supernatural elements in the stories to follow). The collection itself is diverse and of high quality. Some of the stories are quite short, others almost of novella length, but in every case the tale and the setting are vividly evoked. Several deal directly with the Islamic culture of the country, while many are more influenced by a more animistic religious tradition. All of them are heavily influenced, too, by global pop culture: even when the setting is more tribal than urban, there is a confluence of...

Magdalen Nabb published The Monster of Florence in 1996 in the U.K., the 10th of her 14 books featuring Marshall Guarnaccia of the Palazzo Pitti station of the Carabinieri. But for some reason I have never been able to understand, it has never been published in the U.S. until now, with the new edition from Soho Crime. The Monster is quite different, in one striking way, from the other Guarnaccia novels. While all of them deal with large topics of human life through the watery lens of Guarnaccia's eyes (he's allergic to bright light), in terms of ordinary families and ordinary crimes, Monster is a documentary novel, with barely obscured material from the case files of the actual Monster of Florence case (also the subject of a Douglas Preston best selling true crime book and a Roberto Benigni movie). But overall, Guarnaccia remains as his usual melancholy and laconic self, anchoring the book in the canon of Nabb's celebrated crime fiction and in the recognizable reality of th...

The Land of Dreams is a Norwegian novel by Vidar Sundstøl, dealing with a crime in Minnesota, on the shores of Lake Superior, the first of a "Minnesota Trilogy" by the author. This isn't the first time that a Scandinavian novelist has concentrated on America, emigration, and the U.S. Westward expansion: Vilhelm Moberg's Emigrant trilogy certainly deals with all of the above, from a Swedish perspective; and, to travel to even further shores, the Norwegian crime boom could be said to have kicked off with Jo Nesbø's first book, which puts his character Harry Hole in an Australian setting. Sundstøl digs deeply into the culture of the area, juxtaposing Norwegian and Ojibway traditions in particular. There are considerable comic elements in his portrait of Norwegian-Americans, obsessed with their origins, embodied in the forest cop (who works for the U.S. Forest Service, mostly issuing tickets to non-Native-Americans trying to fish out of season), Lance Hansen. Lance...

Two previous novels by Maurizio de Giovanni have been published in English translation, both in the Commissario Ricciardi series set in Naples before World War II and featuring some paranormal elements (and a third Ricciardi novel is set to be published in English in November). I'm not normally drawn to either historical crime novels or supernatural ones, so I hadn't picked up the Ricciardi books, but the publisher, Europa, kindly sent me a copy of De Giovanni's contemporary novel, The Crocodile (and having read that book, I expect to go back to have a look at the other series). The Crocodile is about a serial killer, but not a psychopath of the sort we've come to know so well. This is a methodical killer (hence his nickname and the book's title) who plans carefully, lies in wait for his prey, and kills mercilessly but without a desire to inflict pain on the murdered victims. His motive lies elsewhere, as the police and a disgraced detective, Giuseppe Lojacono, wil...

This second novel (and the first episode of a new series) is a "heart of darkness" story in both its present and its flashback sections. It begins like a serial-killer novel, but quickly turns into something else. Beginning with a flashback, three young graduates decide to leave London for a holiday, and on a whim pick Uganda rather than India (where "everyone" is going). Once there, taking a wrong turn, they end up as captives of a militia. The narrative returns to this adventure/horror again at intervals. The "present" action concerns Jack Carrigan, one of the young men, now a Detective Inspector in London. He is in charge of the investigation of the brutal, sadistic murder of a young African student in her apartment. The police authorities, however, don't trust Carrigan and send a formerly disgraced Sergeant, Geneva Miller, to assist him and report on his conduct of the case. African politics and violence are the main theme, even in the London narra...

Why do I keep on reading Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor novels--there seems to be another one coming out before I can even finish the current one, and they have gotten progressively darker. They're also very loosely constructed, and the most recent one I've read, Purgatory, is very loose indeed. Bruen has mixed his usual characters (the ones that have survived), a serial killer plot that is almost beside the point, a new girlfriend and her boss (both Americans), and lots and lots of pop-culture references. And though there's a lot of misery in the whole Taylor series, this one is indeed a purgatory. The quotes and other mentions of crime fiction have always been a part of the Taylor novels, but they reach a crescendo here (and Taylor, in his first-person narration--though not all of the book is in his voice, even begins to refer to past events in terms of Bruen's book titles, a metafictional gesture totally in keeping with Bruen's method). What's compelling is Brue...