Before the Frost / Henning Mankell

Henning Mankell authored the internationally known detective series featuring Kurt Wallander. This particular volume features his daughter Linda, a character who has been in previous novels, but in this installment she is a recent graduate of the police academy and now joining the police force in Ystad, following in her father’s footsteps. Their relationship is fraught with tension, even though they are probably more like each other than either would care to admit. You don’t always show your best side with family, and this book certainly illustrates that, but I think it is all the more realistic for it.

The main storyline focuses on Linda’s friend Anna. Linda tries to determine her whereabouts after she mysteriously disappears. Things all become a bit complicated with the reappearance of Anna’s long missing father, a cult, arson, and two brutal murders. The final scenes stretch credibility, but are nevertheless suspenseful.

I liked the sense of place in southern Sweden, the strained father-daughter relationship, and the other Ystad characters. I was not so fond of the cult story. In my opinion it needed more development, and was just too sketchily drawn. I think we needed to know more of how the cult was born and grew, why Sweden, and how the cult members were recruited and hid themselves for as long as they did.

Anyway, a trip to Sweden, even through the pages of a book, is always enjoyable. I found myself looking up pictures of Ystad, Lund, and other cathedrals mentioned in the text.

Found this on Hoopla to download for free through the library.

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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...

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.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

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