Jar City, A Rekjavik Thriller / Arnaldur Indriðason

My detective novel tour of Scandinavia continues to Iceland where we meet Inspector Erlendur, a gritty individual who is married to his job, doesn’t take good care of himself, frequently falls asleep and wakes in the morning in an easy chair in his living room, worries about his daughter... Sound familiar? He's really not so unlike Kurt Wallander for those who may be pining for the Swedish gumshoe after the series concluded with The Troubled Man.

In Jar City an old man has his head bashed in with a large ash tray, and a mysterious note left near the body and a cryptic photo of a grave site offer clues to the mystery surrounding his death. The circumstances of his murder are rooted in events that happened forty years ago and it is ingenious how Erlendur teases out the details of the connections between people and events that gradually reveal the identity of the murderer. The key to linking perpetrator to victim is a marker of an unusual genetic disease recorded in Iceland’s genetic database, Íslendingabók, a real life and very controversial effort to map every Icelandic inhabitant’s genetic code. Click here for a piece about Iceland’s controversial genetics database project

The translation from the original Icelandic by Bernard Scudder is absolutely wonderful, especially given my criticism of The Snowman. There is nothing awkward or strange with the translation of Jar City and the prose flows flawlessly (though the translation was obviously geared to a British readership).

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The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

Transient Desires / Donna Leon

Book 30 of the Guido Brunetti mystery series. I haven’t read them all, but enough to enjoy a visit back with a familiar character in a setting I love. Two female American college students are left wounded and unconscious outside the hospital emergency room in the middle of the night. Brunetti soon discovers who left them there, but the question remains why? The plot involves a nephew indebted to his criminal and abusive uncle, and illegal human trafficking. The book ends rather abruptly, and you may get the sense that after twenty-nine installments of the series, the author might just be phoning it in. Nevertheless, this book represented a nice little trip back to a Venice where real people live and work, and this to me is never a waste of time. I downloaded this to my iPad.

Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

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