Peachy Reads

This is the ideal foil to the last couple of books I've read.  The anodyne tangential back-and-forth dialogue, and the unceasing non sequiturs are the perfect replacement for real conversation so absent during these self-isolating times.  But that's what McCall-Smith has always excelled at, after all.  Whether it be Precious Ramotswe, Isabel Dalhousie, Bertie Pollock, or Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfel, it's all about human nature, and never particularly about moving a complex plot forward! This new series is set in a police department in Malmö.  The sensitive crimes that Varg investigates are not the blood-soaked cases of nearby fictional colleague Kurt Wallander!  Instead, we follow a case that involves a minor knifing at a market stall involving a little person, a made-up boyfriend who disappears to the North Pole, and a supposed werewolf who is depressing a hotel's overnight traffic.  Characters are key here.  It's a great escape.

Medical examiner Sara Linton and her partner GBI agent Will Trent stumble across a band of domestic terrorists who have just perpetrated an explosive attack on the Emory medical center. Sara is abducted and Will goes undercover to save her and foil a larger terrorist plot targeted on Atlanta and its airport.  Sara’s journey takes her to a doomsday community somewhere in the Georgia mountains.   There she is confronted with a mysterious health emergency among the children in the camp, which first appears to be measles, but eventually reveals itself as something much more sinister.  This is a well-crafted story, but violence and bio-terrorism were perhaps not the escape I was looking for during a pandemic!  Maybe it was because the setting was Atlanta and Georgia, which normally would be fun, but given recent news headlines, just wasn’t.

Alfred Hitchcock's psycho shower killer has nothing on the frenzied bent murderer in Stalker .  Videos of women in private moments in their homes are posted on the internet, and then within the hour their corpses, with horribly mangled faces, are discovered by police.  A pattern begins to emerge, and of course a surprise ending and a deft escape round out the novel.  The non-stop action and blood-saoked violence unspool breathlessly.  Sure, it's a page-turner, but I found it to be all a bit one-note after awhile. Joona Linna is back from the dead, though the spotlight doesn't fall quite so much on his fascinating personality as it has in previous novels in this series.