The Girl in the Spider's Web / David Lagercrantz

The most famous names from Swedish literature since Pippi Longstocking may well be Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was the first title in the Millennium series, and while the series wasn't perfect, the characters were strong, and the books quickly became a worldwide publishing phenomenon. Due to his untimely death several years ago, the estate of the author Stieg Larsson contracted a new writer to pen a further installment, and along with Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, this may have been one of the most anticipated titles of 2015.

Though some fans will be pleased, others will inevitably be disappointed. I suppose I count myself among the second group. Lisbeth and Mikael seem to be on mood stabilizers and so very different from their previous incarnations as to be almost unidentifiable. The action doesn’t really pick up until the last one hundred or so pages, and though it provides interesting insight into Lisbeth’s twin, Camilla, the novel really doesn’t do much to showcase Lisbeth herself, which for me was probably the biggest disappointment.

There is a quote direct from the book that quite accurately sums up my appraisal of The Girl in the Spider’s Web --

“It was all taking a long time and seemed disorganized and Blomkvist was longing for his bed.” p140

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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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