The Troubled Man / Henning Mankell

The final installment of the popular Kurt Wallander detective series follows Wallander to the end of his career. As he transitions from the loss of his father, his family focus shifts to his newly-born granddaughter and a renewed relationship with his daughter Linda. Worrisome episodes of forgetfulness, however, force him to confront his own mortality, and the sudden death of his once-beloved Baiba is a sign that his remaining years are precious.

The disappearance of Linda’s “in-laws” (since she isn’t married to their son, what’s the proper term?) is the case that preoccupies Wallander in The Troubled Man. Their backstory takes in the complicated history of post-war Europe's Cold War politics, a suggestion of espionage, Olof Palme, the CIA... all culminating with the rash of submarine incursions into Swedish territorial waters from the 1980s that I remember so well.

I was fascinated by Wallander’s last case, but also felt that the entrance into his final life stage was very compelling and realistic. It was sad and melancholy, but life is often that way. Of course, it’s not likely that Mankell will write another Wallander novel, but Conan Doyle did resuscitate Sherlock Holmes, so there is a smidgen of hope. It’s a little sad to say “adjö" to a good Swedish friend.

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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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