50 Best Thrillers and Crime Novels of the past 5 years (The Sunday Times) part 2
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/culture/books/fiction/article1426607.ece
EURO-CRIME
Ghost Riders of Ordebec by Fred Vargas (Vintage)
After decades in which crime fiction in French was dominated by the
Belgian author Georges Simenon, it finally discovered its indisputable new
star: Fred Vargas, the pseudonym of the historian ¬Frédérique
Audoin-Rouzeau.
Vargas’s novels have scooped the CWA International Dagger on three occasions,
and The Ghost Riders of Ordebec is the eighth in her Commissaire Adamsberg
series and an outstanding crime novel.
It opens in Paris, where Adamsberg is interviewing an elderly man whose wife
has choked to death on breadcrumbs. It is a typically oblique opening: a
domestic killing that has little to do with the spectacular murders that
Adamsberg is about to encounter in Normandy.
There, locals link the murders to a mythical troop of riders whose ghostly
appearance always signals death, a piece of folklore that fascinates
Adamsberg, who understands that the apparitions are projections of the
community’s desire for vengeance against people known for their cruelty to
humans or animals.
Patient and humane as ever, Adamsberg realises he needs to disentangle the
myth to prove that it has been exploited by a very ingenious criminal.
Vargas depicts brilliantly a rural community riven with superstition, where
class distinctions have existed for centuries.
Click
to read the opening pages
The Collini Case by Ferdinand von Schirach (M Joseph)
Everything about this novel by a German lawyer-turned-author is
extraordinary.
Ferdinand Von Schirach's story is told in stripped-down prose, beginning with
the murder of a German industrialist by a man, Fabrizio Collini, who
previously led an exemplary existence.
Collini will not say why he shot Hans Meyer, which leaves his inexperienced
lawyer, Caspar Leinen, little to work with. A chance discovery just before
the trial, however, sets Leinen on the trail of a series of atrocities
committed by German troops in Italy during the Second World War.
Schirach's own grandfather, Baldur von Schirach, was Reich Youth Leader of the
Nazi party and governor of Vienna, where he was responsible for deporting
Viennese Jews. He was sentenced at Nuremberg - but other Nazi war criminals
escaped justice because of a little-known clause in post-war German law.
In Germany, Schirach's novel was so successful in highlighting this loophole
that the government even set up a committee to examine it.
For readers in English, it remains a remarkable read in every way.
Click
to read the opening pages
Bed of Nails by Antonin Varenne (MacLehose)
This compelling novel by French author Antonin Varenne opens with a team
of hard-boiled Parisian cops viewing CCTV images of a naked man running into
traffic, culminating in his gory death.
The case belongs to Guerin, a maverick detective who has been put in charge of
investigating suicides. Guerin suspects that some of his suicides were
encouraged to kill themselves by a mysterious couple who regularly appear at
death scenes. His suspicions are further aroused when a young American kills
himself in an S&M nightclub.
With its unusual characters and deliciously unpredictable plot, Bed of Nails
is a strikingly original read, its underlying pessimism balanced by
Varenne's inexhaustible human sympathy.
Click
to read the opening pages
Splinter by Sebastian Fitzek (Corvus)
Sebastian Fitzek’s Splinter is a canny, original take on the
identity-theft tale.
Marc Lucas is recovering from a horrific car crash that killed his pregnant
wife when he gets an invitation to attend a mysterious clinic carrying out
experiments on expunging traumatic memories.
Lucas decides he doesn’t want to take part, but perplexing things start
happening to him: his credit cards are refused, his front door key doesn’t
work and a stranger is working in his office. Worst of all, he returns to
his old flat and discovers his dead wife apparently living there, claiming
not to recognise him.
Fitzek brilliantly controls his narrative so that our doubt over whether Lucas
is losing his reason or sinister forces are at work propels us through his
intriguing, dazzling novel.
Click
to read the opening pages
The Frozen Dead by Bernard Minier (Minotaur)
Somewhere in a remote area of the Pyrenees, a hydroelectric power plant
and an asylum for the criminally insane make unusual neighbours. When a
headless horse is discovered suspended from a frozen cliff near the power
plant, suspicion falls on the inmates of the asylum.
These gothic horrors, reminiscent of an old black-and-white film - insane
killers and sinister nursing staff - made Bernard Minier’s The Frozen Dead a
huge seller in France, and it’s a thrilling read.
Minier’s detective, Servaz, is based in Toulouse and can’t understand why he
has been ordered to investigate the death of an animal. But forensic
evidence links the corpse to an inmate in a locked ward. Servaz is still
puzzling over this conundrum when a series of macabre murders begins.
From there, this clever mystery is driven along by an inner core of revenge,
and the plot is as cold-blooded as the slaying of the horse.
Click
to read the opening pages
NORDIC NOIR
Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indridason (Vintage)
Ever since the Icelandic novelist Arnaldur Indridason won the CWA Gold
Dagger in 2005 for his chiller Silence of the Grave, he has just kept
getting better.
His books are set in Reykjavik, where his Inspector Erlendur surpasses even
Henning Mankell's Wallander for introspection and gloom.
Erlendur is a marvellous creation: divorced, estranged from his grown-up
children (his daughter is a drug addict, which is unfortunate for a
policeman), yet also one of the most sardonic and humane detectives in
contemporary crime fiction.
Indridason has a lively, ingenious imagination - his detective encounters
crimes that range from the bizarre to the utterly heartless. In the novel
Voices, there's a corpse dressed as Father Christmas, while in Arctic Chill
the murder of a young Thai boy reveals the grim lives of Southeast Asian
immigrants in Iceland.
All of Indridason's books are worth reading, but Hypothermia is one of the top
crime novels of the past decade.
It begins with Erlendur troubled by events from his childhood, when he got
lost in a storm with his little brother, whose body was never recovered.
His latest case doesn't appear to have much resonance with his past; it's
officially a suicide, and Erlendur gets involved without his superiors'
knowledge, when he discovers that the victim attended a seance not long
before her death.
He is also trying to close a couple of old cases involving two young adults
who disappeared without trace 30 years ago.
The result is one of the most haunting crime novels you can expect to read:
unsentimental, yet informed throughout by Indridason's extraordinary empathy
with human suffering.
Click
to read the opening pages
Cell 8 by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom (Quercus)
The gulf between the United States and Europe could hardly be wider when
it comes to capital punishment. The spectacle of convicted criminals
spending years on death row in American jails appears cruel and inhuman, and
it is just such a tense countdown to an execution in Ohio that provides the
starting point for this extraordinary novel by the Swedish crime-writing duo
Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom.
Cell 8 ventures into territory that's previously been addressed by American
crime writers, notably John Grisham, but has a twist all of its own.
After a searing account of the execution of a 65-year-old man in Marcusville,
Ohio, the action makes a startling leap to a brawl on a ferry between
Finland and Sweden. John Schwarz is a singer on the boat, entertaining bored
and often drunk passengers. When he sees a man pestering a woman on the
dance floor, he wades in and beats him unconscious.
Schwarz's arrest reveals that the singer is not who he claims to be, turning
up an unexpected link to the condemned cell in Marcusville. Schwarz's real
name is John Meyer Frey, whom we last saw on death row in Ohio, waiting to
be executed for the murder of his girlfriend when he was only 17. More
astonishing is the news that Frey supposedly died of heart failure in his
cell before he could be put to death by the state.
Soon the Americans are demanding the "dead" man back, so that they
can carry out the execution he escaped, and Detective Superintendent Ewert
Grens of the Stockholm police has an international incident on his hands.
Roslund is a journalist, and Hellstrom a former convict, and they use this
riveting setup to make a passionate case against the death penalty. Barring
an improbable element in the plot when the authors' campaigning instinct
gets the better of them, this remarkable novel is taut with suspense to the
end.
Click
to read the opening pages
Someone to Watch Over Me by Yrsa Sigurdadottir (Hodder)
It is a striking fact that disabled people rarely take centre stage in
crime fiction. Perhaps authors feel that their books are dark enough without
addressing subjects such as the vulnerability of patients who are entirely
dependent on other people for their wellbeing. So it feels as if the
Icelandic writer Yrsa Sigurdardottir has broken taboos by setting this novel
in a care home that is burnt down by a fire in which five of the six
residents are killed.
At the beginning of Someone to Watch over Me, the only survivor of the fire is
Jakob, a young man with Down's syndrome.
He has been convicted of arson and is in a secure facility where another
inmate, a convicted child abuser, has become convinced of his innocence.
The paedophile approaches a lawyer, Thora, who has appeared in
Sigurdardottir's other novels, and asks her to reopen the case.
Thora is shocked to discover that some of the residents were horribly abused
before the fire, but she is also astonished by the resilience of the
severely disabled people she encounters.
It all makes for a tough and yet deeply moving novel, lifted even further by
its extraordinary originality of setting and theme.
Click
to read the opening pages
Mercy by Jussi Adler-Olsen (Penguin)
With its mixture of murder and Danish politics, Mercy - the book in which
Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen introduced his stroppy, Rebus-like detective
Carl Morck - was highly reminiscent of the TV series The Killing, and that
was no bad thing.
Morck is here reassigned to cold cases, beginning with the disappearance of a
female MP, Merete Lynggaard. As Morck pursues the clues, the novel’s
counterpointed storyline reveals that Lynggaard is alive but being kept in a
cell where the air pressure is continuously increased.
This may sound like a lurid updating of the Perils of Pauline formula, but the
setup's simplicity is offset by the variety of worlds into which Morck's
inquiries plunge him and his offhand yet decisive contributions to a current
murder case.
Mercy's biggest asset, though, is Assad, the sleuth's charming but unruly
Syrian immigrant assistant. Few sidekicks in crime fiction are as original
and appealing as this brilliant lateral thinker.
Click
to read the opening pages
Frozen Moment by Camilla Ceder (Phoenix)
In recent years, Swedish crime fiction has been dominated by two stellar
names, Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson. They are both excellent novelists
in their own way, but they write from a very male perspective, even when
they’re dealing with female characters.
That’s why Camilla Ceder’s debut novel Frozen Moment is so refreshing, turning
the assumptions of both writers on their head.
The novel is set in rural Sweden, where a man on his way to work makes a
detour to buy petrol from an isolated car repair shop. There, he finds a
dead man, shot in the head and run over repeatedly by a car. Soon this
horrifying murder method is used again, suggesting that the crimes have a
deeply personal motive.
Ceder’s detective is more sensitive than Mankell’s Inspector Wallander and the
novel offers an extraordinary twist on Larsson’s most famous character, the
hacker Lisbeth Salander. It is a terrific debut.
Click
to read the opening pages
CLASSIC CRIME
The Vault by Ruth Rendell (Arrow)
Over the years, Ruth Rendell's crime novels have followed two parallel
tracks: a series of police procedurals starring her wise detective, Chief
Inspector Wexford, and a number of unrelated psychological thrillers. With
Wexford retired, Rendell has spotted an opportunity to bring the two strands
together in this superb novel.
The vault is actually a coal hole beneath Orcadia Cottage, a Georgian house in
St John's Wood in London. Rendell's regular readers will recognise it from
her 1998 novel, A Sight for Sore Eyes; the house had already achieved a kind
of fame because its pop-star tenant and his then girlfriend were painted in
front of it in 1973.
When The Vault opens, Wexford and his wife are on a trip to London. Orcadia
Cottage is inhabited by a wealthy couple who don't know about the coal hole
until they move a tub of flowers behind the house. The husband spots a
manhole cover, struggles to lift it and is horrified to discover four
corpses. Three of them are badly decomposed but the fourth, a young woman,
appears more recent.
One of many clever things about this novel is that it offers a tantalising
mystery for readers unfamiliar with the earlier book, while anyone who
remembers it will know how some - but not all - of the corpses ended up
there.
Wexford comes to the case when the detective in charge asks him for unofficial
assistance; forensic examination complicates the puzzle when it is revealed
that the two male corpses are distantly related, but there is no obvious
connection between the two women.
The novel has a modern twist, in the shape of a subplot about sex-trafficking;
but the author's sheer technical skill is evident as she effortlessly brings
the original story in A Sight for Sore Eyes up to date. Only a novelist
whose characters feel so intensely real to her could pull off such a coup,
and Rendell's relish in calling in Wexford to investigate suggests she
hasn't enjoyed herself so much for ages.
Click
to read the opening pages
Critical Mass by Sara Paretsky (Hodder)
After the Second World War, a number of European scientists who had worked
for Hitler went to America and worked on the atom bomb. Some had actively
collaborated with the Nazis, a fact the Americans were willing to overlook
in their rush to perfect nuclear weapons before the Russians.
Sara Paretsky's Critical Mass is rooted in this history. It plunges her
private eye, VI Warshawski, into an unfamiliar world of cutting-edge
physics, slave labour and the Holocaust.
Warshawski's part in the mystery begins outside Chicago, where a crumbling
farmhouse has been turned into a drugs factory. She is looking for a woman
who has left a desperate message on the answering-machine of Warshawski's
old friend Lotty Herschel, a Viennese doctor whose family died in the
Holocaust.
What Warshawski finds is the body of a drug dealer and a trail of evidence
that suggests that the woman's son is missing. When Warshawski discovers he
is the great-grandson of an Austrian scientist who worked on the Manhattan
Project, she realises that something more than drugs is at stake.
Unusually for Paretsky, Critical Mass moves between the present day and the
first half of the 20th century, when the Radium Institute in Vienna welcomed
women. The novel's most important character, Martina Saginor, is loosely
based on the Austrian Jewish physicist Marietta Blau, who was overlooked for
the Nobel prize.
The result is a daring departure for Paretsky, combining her interests in
women's history, science and the Holocaust - and is a career-crowning
triumph.
Click
to read the opening pages
W is for Wasted by Sue Grafton (Pan)
Sue Grafton's "alphabet" series of crime novels has entertained
readers for years. And in W Is for Wasted she is on absolutely top form,
presenting her private detective Kinsey Millhone with murders that turn out
to be intimately linked to her family history.
This is a shock for Kinsey, who is famously an orphan with few surviving
relatives; but when a homeless man is found dead on a local beach, with
Kinsey's phone number in his pocket, she discovers that most of her
assumptions have been wrong.
Promising an intriguing finale to this much-loved, long-running series,
Grafton's decision to shake up Kinsey's settled existence in W Is for Wasted
is unexpected, and all the more rewarding for it.
Click
to read the opening pages
August Heat by Andrea Camilleri (Picador)
Andrea Camilleri is one of Italy's finest writers, and this Inspector
Montalbano mystery is easily one of the best in his long-running series.
August Heat starts in a seaside villa that seems to be under an almost
biblical curse. Montalbano's friends have their holiday ruined as plagues of
cockroaches and mice erupt through the floors, and when their child
disappears the detective makes two startling discoveries in succession.
One of them is a murdered girl, and for once Montalbano is nonplussed as he
has to deal with her ravishingly beautiful twin sister and a circle of
suspects with mafia connections.
As always, Camilleri portrays Montalbano's dry wit, gourmet appetite and
distaste for corrupt Italian politics in loving detail, but this is a rare
occasion when the worldly inspector seems in danger of losing his head.
Click
to read the opening pages
Hour of the Wolf by Hakan Nesser (Pan)
The Swedish novelist Hakan Nesser exhibits a skill and consistency that
are rare in crime fiction. Hour of the Wolf is one of his finest novels,
beginning with a road accident and unravelling its terrible consequences.
The victim is a 16-year-old boy, struck by a car while walking home late at
night, and the accident sets in motion a series of murders. One of the
victims is related to Nesser's detective, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, who
has retired to become an antiquarian bookseller.
With the ex-policeman's old team rallying to obtain justice for their
much-loved former boss, the thrilling result combines a clever plot with
authentic emotion.
Click
to read the opening pages
RISING STARS
Night of the Mi’raj by Zoe Ferraris (Abacus)
Zoë Ferraris's first novel, The Night of the Mi'raj, brilliantly draws on
her experience of living in Saudi Arabia. It presents a culture where men
are not supposed to even speak to women, and centres on an investigation
into the death of a young woman that is suddenly dropped under pressure from
her wealthy family.
Sixteen-year-old Nouf disappears a few days before her arranged marriage. She
slips out of her family's palatial home on an island off Jeddah, escaping in
a truck with her favourite camel crammed in the back. The family turns for
help to Nayir, a Palestinian who knows the desert well and has often taken
Nouf's elder brothers on expeditions into the wadis. Her brothers reject the
notion that Nouf was unhappy about the marriage, and are stunned when her
battered body is discovered in a remote desert location.
One of the novel's most startling revelations is that Nouf has drowned, caught
in one of the flash floods that sweep through the desert after heavy rain.
But she had been struck on the head before that. It also turns out that she
was pregnant, a puzzling development in a culture where rich young women are
chaperoned at all times, although it may explain the family's eagerness to
stop the inquiry into her death.
As the truth about Nouf's death emerges, the stifling atmosphere in which even
wealthy Saudi women exist is laid bare, along with the risks some are
prepared to take in order to escape.
Ferraris's remarkable debut is a tense psychological drama, and a riveting
portrait of everyday life in a society with paranoid attitudes towards women
and sex.
Click
to read the opening pages
13 Hours by Deon Meyer (Hodder)
It is 5.30am. A terrified young woman is running on a Cape Town
mountainside. Rachel Anderson, an American tourist, is only steps ahead of
the killers of her friend Erin. The two women were ambushed as they left a
club owned by a Russian with gangland links. Put onto the case, Inspector
Benny Griessel doesn’t know why Anderson has been targeted, but he knows he
is in a race with a bunch of killers and that he has just 13 hours to find
Anderson - as US diplomats are threatening to go public and embarrass the
South African government.
What makes Deon Meyer’s novel so outstanding is its setting - the new South
Africa, where jaded white detectives are still getting used to working with
black and “coloured” (in the country’s parlance) colleagues.
At the start of the novel, Griessel has been told to “mentor” detectives from
ethnic backgrounds, but only one, Vusumuzi Ndabeni, is keen to learn from
him. The two cops have barely finished collecting evidence when another of
Griessel’s rookies calls about the killing of Adam Barnard, a wealthy record
producer.
Meanwhile, Griessel and Ndabeni learn that the American friends had just
arrived from Zimbabwe, a country where desperate refugees will do anything
to cross the border. The last thing the detectives expect to find is that
Rachel’s flight is connected to Barnard’s murder; when a link is found, it
leads to an astonishing and violent climax. Amid all this, Meyer gives rare
insights into the texture of everyday life in a country still troubled 20
years after the release of Nelson Mandela.
Click
to read the opening pages
Dogstar Rising by Parker Bilal (Bloomsbury)
Parker Bilal’s books take place a decade before the Arab spring, in a
Cairo where corruption and police brutality are the norm. His detective,
Makana, is an outsider, a former Sudanese police officer scraping a living
as a private detective in Cairo.
Dogstar Rising, the second title in this Egypt-set series by Bilal - a
pseudonym of British literary novelist Jamal Mahjoub - is perhaps even more
gripping than the first in the series, The Golden Scales.
Here, tension between the majority Muslim population and the Christian Copts
forms the background to a story in which sightings of a mysterious “angel”
near a Coptic church seem to be linked to the murders of young boys.
Bilal’s skills are evident throughout, in the pace, confidence and emotional
truth of this brilliant novel.
Click
to read the opening pages
Black Water Rising by Attica Locke (Serpent’s Tail)
This accomplished first novel from the US - which won Attica Locke a
shortlisting for the 2010 Orange Prize - introduced a crime writer of great
promise.
Set in Texas in 1981, it's the story of an African-American lawyer who used to
be part of the civil-rights movement but prefers to keep a low profile these
days.
When he takes his wife on an evening cruise on the Houston bayou to celebrate
her birthday, he rescues a woman from the water but can’t persuade her to
explain how she got there. It’s a dramatic opening and the lawyer’s urge to
walk away is frustrated when he discovers that a man died nearby on the same
evening.
As the title implies, this is a novel about the oil industry and the damage it
does to the environment. At one level, it’s a classic tale of an individual
taking on the system, but Locke’s themes of racial tension and green
politics give it an added edge that has made her one of the most exciting
new writers in crime.
Click
to read the opening pages
Darkside by Belinda Bauer (Corgi)
Belinda Bauer won the CWA Gold Dagger for her first crime novel,
Blacklands, and this is her barnstorming follow-up.
Jonas Holly is the local bobby in Shipcott, the Somerset village where
Blacklands was set, and he feels a heavy responsibility for the safety of
its inhabitants. He is already dealing with a personal tragedy, the decline
of his wife Lucy who suffers from MS, when someone starts killing vulnerable
people in the village. The first victim is a woman paralysed from the neck
down after a riding accident, while the second suffers from dementia.
Holly has known the victims all his life and he resents having to hand over
the investigation to Marvel, a boorish detective chief inspector from
Taunton.
Marvel treats Holly as an idiot, but that isn't the only insult the tortured
young PC has to put up with; anonymous notes start turning up, taunting
Holly about his failure to stop the killer and forcing him to take desperate
measures.
Bold, mordant and compassionate, Darkside confirms Bauer's reputation as a
huge new talent.
Click
to read the opening pages
EURO-CRIME
Ghost Riders of Ordebec by Fred Vargas (Vintage)
After decades in which crime fiction in French was dominated by the
Belgian author Georges Simenon, it finally discovered its indisputable new
star: Fred Vargas, the pseudonym of the historian ¬Frédérique
Audoin-Rouzeau.
Vargas’s novels have scooped the CWA International Dagger on three occasions,
and The Ghost Riders of Ordebec is the eighth in her Commissaire Adamsberg
series and an outstanding crime novel.
It opens in Paris, where Adamsberg is interviewing an elderly man whose wife
has choked to death on breadcrumbs. It is a typically oblique opening: a
domestic killing that has little to do with the spectacular murders that
Adamsberg is about to encounter in Normandy.
There, locals link the murders to a mythical troop of riders whose ghostly
appearance always signals death, a piece of folklore that fascinates
Adamsberg, who understands that the apparitions are projections of the
community’s desire for vengeance against people known for their cruelty to
humans or animals.
Patient and humane as ever, Adamsberg realises he needs to disentangle the
myth to prove that it has been exploited by a very ingenious criminal.
Vargas depicts brilliantly a rural community riven with superstition, where
class distinctions have existed for centuries.
Click
to read the opening pages
The Collini Case by Ferdinand von Schirach (M Joseph)
Everything about this novel by a German lawyer-turned-author is
extraordinary.
Ferdinand Von Schirach's story is told in stripped-down prose, beginning with
the murder of a German industrialist by a man, Fabrizio Collini, who
previously led an exemplary existence.
Collini will not say why he shot Hans Meyer, which leaves his inexperienced
lawyer, Caspar Leinen, little to work with. A chance discovery just before
the trial, however, sets Leinen on the trail of a series of atrocities
committed by German troops in Italy during the Second World War.
Schirach's own grandfather, Baldur von Schirach, was Reich Youth Leader of the
Nazi party and governor of Vienna, where he was responsible for deporting
Viennese Jews. He was sentenced at Nuremberg - but other Nazi war criminals
escaped justice because of a little-known clause in post-war German law.
In Germany, Schirach's novel was so successful in highlighting this loophole
that the government even set up a committee to examine it.
For readers in English, it remains a remarkable read in every way.
Click
to read the opening pages
Bed of Nails by Antonin Varenne (MacLehose)
This compelling novel by French author Antonin Varenne opens with a team
of hard-boiled Parisian cops viewing CCTV images of a naked man running into
traffic, culminating in his gory death.
The case belongs to Guerin, a maverick detective who has been put in charge of
investigating suicides. Guerin suspects that some of his suicides were
encouraged to kill themselves by a mysterious couple who regularly appear at
death scenes. His suspicions are further aroused when a young American kills
himself in an S&M nightclub.
With its unusual characters and deliciously unpredictable plot, Bed of Nails
is a strikingly original read, its underlying pessimism balanced by
Varenne's inexhaustible human sympathy.
Click
to read the opening pages
Splinter by Sebastian Fitzek (Corvus)
Sebastian Fitzek’s Splinter is a canny, original take on the
identity-theft tale.
Marc Lucas is recovering from a horrific car crash that killed his pregnant
wife when he gets an invitation to attend a mysterious clinic carrying out
experiments on expunging traumatic memories.
Lucas decides he doesn’t want to take part, but perplexing things start
happening to him: his credit cards are refused, his front door key doesn’t
work and a stranger is working in his office. Worst of all, he returns to
his old flat and discovers his dead wife apparently living there, claiming
not to recognise him.
Fitzek brilliantly controls his narrative so that our doubt over whether Lucas
is losing his reason or sinister forces are at work propels us through his
intriguing, dazzling novel.
Click
to read the opening pages
The Frozen Dead by Bernard Minier (Minotaur)
Somewhere in a remote area of the Pyrenees, a hydroelectric power plant
and an asylum for the criminally insane make unusual neighbours. When a
headless horse is discovered suspended from a frozen cliff near the power
plant, suspicion falls on the inmates of the asylum.
These gothic horrors, reminiscent of an old black-and-white film - insane
killers and sinister nursing staff - made Bernard Minier’s The Frozen Dead a
huge seller in France, and it’s a thrilling read.
Minier’s detective, Servaz, is based in Toulouse and can’t understand why he
has been ordered to investigate the death of an animal. But forensic
evidence links the corpse to an inmate in a locked ward. Servaz is still
puzzling over this conundrum when a series of macabre murders begins.
From there, this clever mystery is driven along by an inner core of revenge,
and the plot is as cold-blooded as the slaying of the horse.
Click
to read the opening pages
NORDIC NOIR
Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indridason (Vintage)
Ever since the Icelandic novelist Arnaldur Indridason won the CWA Gold
Dagger in 2005 for his chiller Silence of the Grave, he has just kept
getting better.
His books are set in Reykjavik, where his Inspector Erlendur surpasses even
Henning Mankell's Wallander for introspection and gloom.
Erlendur is a marvellous creation: divorced, estranged from his grown-up
children (his daughter is a drug addict, which is unfortunate for a
policeman), yet also one of the most sardonic and humane detectives in
contemporary crime fiction.
Indridason has a lively, ingenious imagination - his detective encounters
crimes that range from the bizarre to the utterly heartless. In the novel
Voices, there's a corpse dressed as Father Christmas, while in Arctic Chill
the murder of a young Thai boy reveals the grim lives of Southeast Asian
immigrants in Iceland.
All of Indridason's books are worth reading, but Hypothermia is one of the top
crime novels of the past decade.
It begins with Erlendur troubled by events from his childhood, when he got
lost in a storm with his little brother, whose body was never recovered.
His latest case doesn't appear to have much resonance with his past; it's
officially a suicide, and Erlendur gets involved without his superiors'
knowledge, when he discovers that the victim attended a seance not long
before her death.
He is also trying to close a couple of old cases involving two young adults
who disappeared without trace 30 years ago.
The result is one of the most haunting crime novels you can expect to read:
unsentimental, yet informed throughout by Indridason's extraordinary empathy
with human suffering.
Click
to read the opening pages
Cell 8 by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom (Quercus)
The gulf between the United States and Europe could hardly be wider when
it comes to capital punishment. The spectacle of convicted criminals
spending years on death row in American jails appears cruel and inhuman, and
it is just such a tense countdown to an execution in Ohio that provides the
starting point for this extraordinary novel by the Swedish crime-writing duo
Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom.
Cell 8 ventures into territory that's previously been addressed by American
crime writers, notably John Grisham, but has a twist all of its own.
After a searing account of the execution of a 65-year-old man in Marcusville,
Ohio, the action makes a startling leap to a brawl on a ferry between
Finland and Sweden. John Schwarz is a singer on the boat, entertaining bored
and often drunk passengers. When he sees a man pestering a woman on the
dance floor, he wades in and beats him unconscious.
Schwarz's arrest reveals that the singer is not who he claims to be, turning
up an unexpected link to the condemned cell in Marcusville. Schwarz's real
name is John Meyer Frey, whom we last saw on death row in Ohio, waiting to
be executed for the murder of his girlfriend when he was only 17. More
astonishing is the news that Frey supposedly died of heart failure in his
cell before he could be put to death by the state.
Soon the Americans are demanding the "dead" man back, so that they
can carry out the execution he escaped, and Detective Superintendent Ewert
Grens of the Stockholm police has an international incident on his hands.
Roslund is a journalist, and Hellstrom a former convict, and they use this
riveting setup to make a passionate case against the death penalty. Barring
an improbable element in the plot when the authors' campaigning instinct
gets the better of them, this remarkable novel is taut with suspense to the
end.
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Someone to Watch Over Me by Yrsa Sigurdadottir (Hodder)
It is a striking fact that disabled people rarely take centre stage in
crime fiction. Perhaps authors feel that their books are dark enough without
addressing subjects such as the vulnerability of patients who are entirely
dependent on other people for their wellbeing. So it feels as if the
Icelandic writer Yrsa Sigurdardottir has broken taboos by setting this novel
in a care home that is burnt down by a fire in which five of the six
residents are killed.
At the beginning of Someone to Watch over Me, the only survivor of the fire is
Jakob, a young man with Down's syndrome.
He has been convicted of arson and is in a secure facility where another
inmate, a convicted child abuser, has become convinced of his innocence.
The paedophile approaches a lawyer, Thora, who has appeared in
Sigurdardottir's other novels, and asks her to reopen the case.
Thora is shocked to discover that some of the residents were horribly abused
before the fire, but she is also astonished by the resilience of the
severely disabled people she encounters.
It all makes for a tough and yet deeply moving novel, lifted even further by
its extraordinary originality of setting and theme.
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Mercy by Jussi Adler-Olsen (Penguin)
With its mixture of murder and Danish politics, Mercy - the book in which
Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen introduced his stroppy, Rebus-like detective
Carl Morck - was highly reminiscent of the TV series The Killing, and that
was no bad thing.
Morck is here reassigned to cold cases, beginning with the disappearance of a
female MP, Merete Lynggaard. As Morck pursues the clues, the novel’s
counterpointed storyline reveals that Lynggaard is alive but being kept in a
cell where the air pressure is continuously increased.
This may sound like a lurid updating of the Perils of Pauline formula, but the
setup's simplicity is offset by the variety of worlds into which Morck's
inquiries plunge him and his offhand yet decisive contributions to a current
murder case.
Mercy's biggest asset, though, is Assad, the sleuth's charming but unruly
Syrian immigrant assistant. Few sidekicks in crime fiction are as original
and appealing as this brilliant lateral thinker.
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Frozen Moment by Camilla Ceder (Phoenix)
In recent years, Swedish crime fiction has been dominated by two stellar
names, Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson. They are both excellent novelists
in their own way, but they write from a very male perspective, even when
they’re dealing with female characters.
That’s why Camilla Ceder’s debut novel Frozen Moment is so refreshing, turning
the assumptions of both writers on their head.
The novel is set in rural Sweden, where a man on his way to work makes a
detour to buy petrol from an isolated car repair shop. There, he finds a
dead man, shot in the head and run over repeatedly by a car. Soon this
horrifying murder method is used again, suggesting that the crimes have a
deeply personal motive.
Ceder’s detective is more sensitive than Mankell’s Inspector Wallander and the
novel offers an extraordinary twist on Larsson’s most famous character, the
hacker Lisbeth Salander. It is a terrific debut.
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CLASSIC CRIME
The Vault by Ruth Rendell (Arrow)
Over the years, Ruth Rendell's crime novels have followed two parallel
tracks: a series of police procedurals starring her wise detective, Chief
Inspector Wexford, and a number of unrelated psychological thrillers. With
Wexford retired, Rendell has spotted an opportunity to bring the two strands
together in this superb novel.
The vault is actually a coal hole beneath Orcadia Cottage, a Georgian house in
St John's Wood in London. Rendell's regular readers will recognise it from
her 1998 novel, A Sight for Sore Eyes; the house had already achieved a kind
of fame because its pop-star tenant and his then girlfriend were painted in
front of it in 1973.
When The Vault opens, Wexford and his wife are on a trip to London. Orcadia
Cottage is inhabited by a wealthy couple who don't know about the coal hole
until they move a tub of flowers behind the house. The husband spots a
manhole cover, struggles to lift it and is horrified to discover four
corpses. Three of them are badly decomposed but the fourth, a young woman,
appears more recent.
One of many clever things about this novel is that it offers a tantalising
mystery for readers unfamiliar with the earlier book, while anyone who
remembers it will know how some - but not all - of the corpses ended up
there.
Wexford comes to the case when the detective in charge asks him for unofficial
assistance; forensic examination complicates the puzzle when it is revealed
that the two male corpses are distantly related, but there is no obvious
connection between the two women.
The novel has a modern twist, in the shape of a subplot about sex-trafficking;
but the author's sheer technical skill is evident as she effortlessly brings
the original story in A Sight for Sore Eyes up to date. Only a novelist
whose characters feel so intensely real to her could pull off such a coup,
and Rendell's relish in calling in Wexford to investigate suggests she
hasn't enjoyed herself so much for ages.
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Critical Mass by Sara Paretsky (Hodder)
After the Second World War, a number of European scientists who had worked
for Hitler went to America and worked on the atom bomb. Some had actively
collaborated with the Nazis, a fact the Americans were willing to overlook
in their rush to perfect nuclear weapons before the Russians.
Sara Paretsky's Critical Mass is rooted in this history. It plunges her
private eye, VI Warshawski, into an unfamiliar world of cutting-edge
physics, slave labour and the Holocaust.
Warshawski's part in the mystery begins outside Chicago, where a crumbling
farmhouse has been turned into a drugs factory. She is looking for a woman
who has left a desperate message on the answering-machine of Warshawski's
old friend Lotty Herschel, a Viennese doctor whose family died in the
Holocaust.
What Warshawski finds is the body of a drug dealer and a trail of evidence
that suggests that the woman's son is missing. When Warshawski discovers he
is the great-grandson of an Austrian scientist who worked on the Manhattan
Project, she realises that something more than drugs is at stake.
Unusually for Paretsky, Critical Mass moves between the present day and the
first half of the 20th century, when the Radium Institute in Vienna welcomed
women. The novel's most important character, Martina Saginor, is loosely
based on the Austrian Jewish physicist Marietta Blau, who was overlooked for
the Nobel prize.
The result is a daring departure for Paretsky, combining her interests in
women's history, science and the Holocaust - and is a career-crowning
triumph.
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W is for Wasted by Sue Grafton (Pan)
Sue Grafton's "alphabet" series of crime novels has entertained
readers for years. And in W Is for Wasted she is on absolutely top form,
presenting her private detective Kinsey Millhone with murders that turn out
to be intimately linked to her family history.
This is a shock for Kinsey, who is famously an orphan with few surviving
relatives; but when a homeless man is found dead on a local beach, with
Kinsey's phone number in his pocket, she discovers that most of her
assumptions have been wrong.
Promising an intriguing finale to this much-loved, long-running series,
Grafton's decision to shake up Kinsey's settled existence in W Is for Wasted
is unexpected, and all the more rewarding for it.
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August Heat by Andrea Camilleri (Picador)
Andrea Camilleri is one of Italy's finest writers, and this Inspector
Montalbano mystery is easily one of the best in his long-running series.
August Heat starts in a seaside villa that seems to be under an almost
biblical curse. Montalbano's friends have their holiday ruined as plagues of
cockroaches and mice erupt through the floors, and when their child
disappears the detective makes two startling discoveries in succession.
One of them is a murdered girl, and for once Montalbano is nonplussed as he
has to deal with her ravishingly beautiful twin sister and a circle of
suspects with mafia connections.
As always, Camilleri portrays Montalbano's dry wit, gourmet appetite and
distaste for corrupt Italian politics in loving detail, but this is a rare
occasion when the worldly inspector seems in danger of losing his head.
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Hour of the Wolf by Hakan Nesser (Pan)
The Swedish novelist Hakan Nesser exhibits a skill and consistency that
are rare in crime fiction. Hour of the Wolf is one of his finest novels,
beginning with a road accident and unravelling its terrible consequences.
The victim is a 16-year-old boy, struck by a car while walking home late at
night, and the accident sets in motion a series of murders. One of the
victims is related to Nesser's detective, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, who
has retired to become an antiquarian bookseller.
With the ex-policeman's old team rallying to obtain justice for their
much-loved former boss, the thrilling result combines a clever plot with
authentic emotion.
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RISING STARS
Night of the Mi’raj by Zoe Ferraris (Abacus)
Zoë Ferraris's first novel, The Night of the Mi'raj, brilliantly draws on
her experience of living in Saudi Arabia. It presents a culture where men
are not supposed to even speak to women, and centres on an investigation
into the death of a young woman that is suddenly dropped under pressure from
her wealthy family.
Sixteen-year-old Nouf disappears a few days before her arranged marriage. She
slips out of her family's palatial home on an island off Jeddah, escaping in
a truck with her favourite camel crammed in the back. The family turns for
help to Nayir, a Palestinian who knows the desert well and has often taken
Nouf's elder brothers on expeditions into the wadis. Her brothers reject the
notion that Nouf was unhappy about the marriage, and are stunned when her
battered body is discovered in a remote desert location.
One of the novel's most startling revelations is that Nouf has drowned, caught
in one of the flash floods that sweep through the desert after heavy rain.
But she had been struck on the head before that. It also turns out that she
was pregnant, a puzzling development in a culture where rich young women are
chaperoned at all times, although it may explain the family's eagerness to
stop the inquiry into her death.
As the truth about Nouf's death emerges, the stifling atmosphere in which even
wealthy Saudi women exist is laid bare, along with the risks some are
prepared to take in order to escape.
Ferraris's remarkable debut is a tense psychological drama, and a riveting
portrait of everyday life in a society with paranoid attitudes towards women
and sex.
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13 Hours by Deon Meyer (Hodder)
It is 5.30am. A terrified young woman is running on a Cape Town
mountainside. Rachel Anderson, an American tourist, is only steps ahead of
the killers of her friend Erin. The two women were ambushed as they left a
club owned by a Russian with gangland links. Put onto the case, Inspector
Benny Griessel doesn’t know why Anderson has been targeted, but he knows he
is in a race with a bunch of killers and that he has just 13 hours to find
Anderson - as US diplomats are threatening to go public and embarrass the
South African government.
What makes Deon Meyer’s novel so outstanding is its setting - the new South
Africa, where jaded white detectives are still getting used to working with
black and “coloured” (in the country’s parlance) colleagues.
At the start of the novel, Griessel has been told to “mentor” detectives from
ethnic backgrounds, but only one, Vusumuzi Ndabeni, is keen to learn from
him. The two cops have barely finished collecting evidence when another of
Griessel’s rookies calls about the killing of Adam Barnard, a wealthy record
producer.
Meanwhile, Griessel and Ndabeni learn that the American friends had just
arrived from Zimbabwe, a country where desperate refugees will do anything
to cross the border. The last thing the detectives expect to find is that
Rachel’s flight is connected to Barnard’s murder; when a link is found, it
leads to an astonishing and violent climax. Amid all this, Meyer gives rare
insights into the texture of everyday life in a country still troubled 20
years after the release of Nelson Mandela.
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Dogstar Rising by Parker Bilal (Bloomsbury)
Parker Bilal’s books take place a decade before the Arab spring, in a
Cairo where corruption and police brutality are the norm. His detective,
Makana, is an outsider, a former Sudanese police officer scraping a living
as a private detective in Cairo.
Dogstar Rising, the second title in this Egypt-set series by Bilal - a
pseudonym of British literary novelist Jamal Mahjoub - is perhaps even more
gripping than the first in the series, The Golden Scales.
Here, tension between the majority Muslim population and the Christian Copts
forms the background to a story in which sightings of a mysterious “angel”
near a Coptic church seem to be linked to the murders of young boys.
Bilal’s skills are evident throughout, in the pace, confidence and emotional
truth of this brilliant novel.
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Black Water Rising by Attica Locke (Serpent’s Tail)
This accomplished first novel from the US - which won Attica Locke a
shortlisting for the 2010 Orange Prize - introduced a crime writer of great
promise.
Set in Texas in 1981, it's the story of an African-American lawyer who used to
be part of the civil-rights movement but prefers to keep a low profile these
days.
When he takes his wife on an evening cruise on the Houston bayou to celebrate
her birthday, he rescues a woman from the water but can’t persuade her to
explain how she got there. It’s a dramatic opening and the lawyer’s urge to
walk away is frustrated when he discovers that a man died nearby on the same
evening.
As the title implies, this is a novel about the oil industry and the damage it
does to the environment. At one level, it’s a classic tale of an individual
taking on the system, but Locke’s themes of racial tension and green
politics give it an added edge that has made her one of the most exciting
new writers in crime.
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Darkside by Belinda Bauer (Corgi)
Belinda Bauer won the CWA Gold Dagger for her first crime novel,
Blacklands, and this is her barnstorming follow-up.
Jonas Holly is the local bobby in Shipcott, the Somerset village where
Blacklands was set, and he feels a heavy responsibility for the safety of
its inhabitants. He is already dealing with a personal tragedy, the decline
of his wife Lucy who suffers from MS, when someone starts killing vulnerable
people in the village. The first victim is a woman paralysed from the neck
down after a riding accident, while the second suffers from dementia.
Holly has known the victims all his life and he resents having to hand over
the investigation to Marvel, a boorish detective chief inspector from
Taunton.
Marvel treats Holly as an idiot, but that isn't the only insult the tortured
young PC has to put up with; anonymous notes start turning up, taunting
Holly about his failure to stop the killer and forcing him to take desperate
measures.
Bold, mordant and compassionate, Darkside confirms Bauer's reputation as a
huge new talent.
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