clair081

The new novels by Karin Fossum of Norway and Stuart Neville of Northern Ireland have little in common (except for being works by two of the most prominent and accomplished crime novels working today). Both, however, demonstrate an inevitability in their motion toward a conclusion, and a tragic sense of character that determines the story. Neville's So Say the Fallen continues the story of Belfast detective Serena Flanagan, the central character in two of his previous books. This time, she reluctantly takes on the case of the apparent suicide of a wealthy car dealer who was the victim of a car crash in which he had lost his legs. He and his wife had also in the recent past lost their young child in a swimming accident while on vacation in Spain, death and disaster seemingly following them around. But details of the crime scene make Flanagan uneasy. Among the witnesses she interviews is the minister in whose church the dead man had been active, and Flanagan begins to gravitate toward...

Frédéric Dard was a prolific crime writer in the 20th century who had a major series (173 novels) about about the invincible Detective Superintendent Antoine San-Antonio, and also other novels, some of which fit into the French noir category. One of these is Bird in a Cage, recently published by Pushkin Vertigo in David Bellos's translation. Bird in a Cage is a twisty tale of a concentrated, tense return to a Paris suburb by an ex-con (the narrator), who has learned that his estranged mother has died. He stays in her apartment, visits a restaurant that had been held up by his mother as the height of elegance and expense, and there encounters a young mother and her daughter. He more or less follows them into a movie theater, and there begins a tentative relationship, assisting her with her sleeping child when they leave the cinema. From there, the narrator is plunged into a labyrinth of a disappearing corpse, clues and even rooms that appear and vanish, and a tightening web in which...

The latest Hanne Wilhelmsen novel by Anne Holt is one of the most intense. Cecilie, her life-partner, is ill, and Hanne is confronting uncomfortable realities at home and at work. When a prosecutor phones the police to say that his wife has been decapitated while he was forced to watch, a series of events is set in motion: the man whom the prosecutor saw murder his wife turns out to be dead, a suicide some time before the murder. With a deceased suspect, the attention of the police naturally turns to the most logical alternative, the prosecutor himself. What follows is an unconventional puzzle mystery that will involve another murder, a murderer who is also a victim of child abuse, a ring of abusers and a ring of vigilantes, and a reassessment by Hanne of everything and everyone in her life. Holt's novels are more focused on the lives, both inner and social, of her police characters than some in the Scandinavian crime wave, and sometimes the personalities of the detectives can be a...

Cara Black's Aimée Leduc series has delivered, in 15 volumes, interesting characters, enticing views of Paris, intricate plots, and thrilling conclusions. In the 16th, Murder on the Quai, she delivers all that plus Aimee's "foundation myth," the story of the origins of her profession, her partner Rene, her dog Miles Davis, and her fraught family history--plus the wartime resistance, Nazi gold, and more. Aimée makes a charming gamine-detective, just at the beginning of developing her skills as a detective. We also see her father firsthand, and get a glimpse of the story of his death, frequently referred to in the series. Plus we get a brief glimpse of Aimée's mother, also a frequent source of internal conflict for the detective throughout the series. But in all cases, the shift in perspective from the recent past (all the Leduc stories are set some 10 years or so before their publication date, giving the key source of her detective agency's income, data protect...

Henry Green's 1942 novel Caught has all the elements of a thriller: a volunteer fireman in London at the start of World War II, the kidnapping of his child, the scenes of bombing and destruction. But Green (not his real name, but he was indeed a fireman in London during the blitz) undercuts the heroism and thrill at every corner. He tells the story in scraps beginning with the end of the kidnapping, when Richard Roe's son is rescued from a mentally ill woman by her brother. Unfortunately for Row, the brother turns out to be his superior officer in the firehouse, later. But later and sooner are all mixed up, as the narrative moves back and forth through the first year of the war, before the blitz, leading up to a final conflagration and death that are not at all what a conventional novel would provide. Green, though, was not at all a conventional writer. His books (most of which lack dramatic events such as those that frame Caught) dissect sex, class, and daily life in twisted p...

Killer Deal is a new Swedish crime novel, the first in an apparently popular series to be translated into English. The setup is interesting (a family is in the midst of separating, and becuase of that selling their house. After an open house the husband is found dead. There's also a nice twist at the end, creating an unexpectedly open conclusion. However, I just could not get into the book--it's too suburban, almost small-town cozy. There's too much intertwining of the detective's life and the people involved in the case, as if everyone in this part of Stockholm is separated by considerably fewer than six degrees.  The writing is OK, geared more to best-seller than literary status, and the characters are believable. But there are lots of subgenres in crime fiction, and I guess not all of them appeal to all of us. And it's definitely a window o...

Lola Smirnova's Twisted and Craved, the first two novels of a trilogy, apparently, offer enough crime, misery, drugs, alcohol, sex, and even occasional pleasure for a dozen crime novels, but these are not really crime novels (despite the excess of crime, especially crimes against women, in them). Instead, Smirnova has constructed an episodic fictional memoir by Julia, who with her sisters Natalia and Lena, depart from a difficult life in Ukraine into an even riskier world of sex work, primarily nude dancing and sometimes prostitution. They are not being trafficked, they are entering into contracts more or less with their eyes open. And the sisters, each in her own way, are looking for a home life, with or without romance--in some ways the novels are the antithesis of romance fiction. The story begins with an S/M scenario and then flashes back to the beginning of Julia's story. The sisters travel first to Luxembourg and then to Turkey, encountering many, many unpleasant men, acr...