Peachy Reads

A group of old men makes a small winning with the lottery and after their celebratory bender, 72-year-old Waldemar Leverkuhn ends up dead at home in his bed with twenty-eight stab wounds. The same night one of his drinking buddies disappears, and several days later the concierge’s wife from the Leverkuhns' building is reported missing.  Is someone stalking senior citizens?  Are the cases even related?  When Fru Leverkuhn confesses to the murder of her husband, it seems that the case is solved… or is it?  Truth be told, this novel didn’t really pick up until about page 200 for me, which is a shame, because the last 100 or so pages were well worth it and the plotline is really rather clever, with the reader guessing until the last page about motives and responsible parties. This was the first Håkan Nesser  novel that I’d read. I picked it up because of my fondness for Scandinavian mystery/thrillers and the fact that it had both a “ü” and an “å” on the cover.  Münster's Case

It seems more than a bit incongruous that Sweden, a neutral peace-loving nation, would be one of the world’s top weapons producers and exporters. The weapons industry is the context for this latest thriller from the Swedish couple writing under the pseudonym Lars Kepler. It’s a chase from start to finish when a contract killer is hired to hunt down peace activist Penelope Fernandez when she inadvertently finds herself in an intrigue involving government officials and illegal weapons exports to Sudan. At first she and her boyfriend are relentlessly hunted on a remote island in the Stockholm archipelago (with a very strange stop at the summer house of a faded TV personality who tries to involve them in sex games… hunh?), then the chase switches to Stockholm (with an exciting shoot-out at Östermalms market hall and the German embassy near Gärdet). The translation is a little spotty-- there were some odd lexical choices. A main theme which comes up again and again is to “reap your nig

Alan Clay, a man who has made a lifetime of poor decisions, is staging a last-ditch effort to put things right. If he can win a contract to provide telecom infrastructure for King Abdullah’s Economic City in Saudi Arabia, the windfall would set his life back on track, allow him to pay off his debts, see his daughter through college, set him up for the remainder of his life. As he and his team wait days and then weeks for a chance to make a pitch to the king, they find themselves in a situation a little like Waiting for Godot , whiling away time in a desert purgatory, waiting for someone who may never come, for an opportunity which may never materialize. Alan is quick to make friends, and his interactions with driver Yousef, expat Hanne, and a local doctor provide interesting episodes in a novel that is essentially plotless (and I don’t mean that as a criticism). Saudi Arabia is a fascinating study of contrasts, which makes it an ideal setting for a world turned topsy-turvy-- the cert