Peachy Reads

After six-year-old Maja tragically and mysteriously disappears on a family winter hike to a nearby lighthouse, her father Anders falls into a pattern of drunken depression. Eventually returning to the island where it happened, he suddenly feels an eerie connection with his lost daughter and senses that she is not gone. Other strange and inexplicable occurrences begin to happen, villagers act as if they are possessed, houses are burnt down, and mysterious and frightening things happen after nightfall. Everything seems to be linked to an ominous presence inhabiting the sea surrounding the island, centered at the lighthouse at Gåvasten where Maja disappeared. Harbor takes place mostly on the fictional island of Domarö in the sea of Åland east of Stockholm. The story spans several generations, so the reader is offered a historical and social context for the strange happenings that have taken place and continue to take place on the island. There are some flashbacks that offer an almost nos...

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 geneti...

Sarah’s Key charts two parallel stories—one from Nazi-occupied Paris and the other sixty years later. The common element is an apartment on the rue de Saintonge and its horrible secret that links two families a generation apart. The story begins with events set in motion by the horrific roundup of Parisian Jews during an initiative known as the Vel’ d’Hiv, (named for the Vélodrome d’hiver) in which Jewish families were warehoused in an indoor stadium under the most inhumane conditions by the French police (not the occupying German Nazis) until they were shipped off to internment camps and, in most cases, their eventual deaths. Julia is a journalist who uncovers the details linking 1942 and 2002, a link that involves her immediate family. The tragic secrets of rue de Saintonge are gradually revealed until the end of the novel where a tidy, but nevertheless quite plausible resolution, pulls all the narrative strands together. This is a powerful book, full of emotion, full of grief. The c...

Okay, so I wanted to find out more about Aimée Leduc, the Parisian gumshoe I was introduced to in Murder in Passy , which was the eleventh in the bestselling series. I rewound to the debut novel, Murder in the Marais . The plot is an interesting (but perhaps overly complicated) tangle of events centered on the Parisian Jewish community involving several murders, two in contemporary times, others dating to World War II. There are Nazi collaborators, a secret contemporary German organization called the Werewolves, French neonazis, corrupt politicians, and more. I was a little bewildered by language issues— Cara Black liberally sprinkles her dialogue with French interjections, and it all seems a bit faux . French Neonazis spout German catchphrases in a meeting in Paris. I suppose this is possible, though I’m not sure why German would be the lingua franca of skinheads just because the Third Reich was German. (I would find it similarly remarkable that German would be used much in mee...

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...

I really wanted to like this novel. I’ve been captivated by the Scandinavian thriller phenom that has put authors like Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, and Lars Kepler on international bestseller lists and the top of public library circulation logs. Jo Nesbø is a Norwegian crime writer whose police inspector Harry Hole (last name is two syllables) is an interesting character. Jo Nesbø has now written seven novels with Harry Hole, and while I may have missed some of the background to characters and context in the series by jumping in with The Snowman , the main difficulty I had seemed to be with the English translation. When a novel “feels” like it’s been translated from a foreign language, then there’s an issue with the translation. I felt that the novel was a slow-starter, and I think much of this has to do with the rough translation. Sometimes it was fine, other times it was so clunky it felt like an unedited term paper. I tried to collect some examples of weird translator errors whic...

Snakes alive! Judging from the cover of this memoir, you might guess you were in for a book-length swampy herpetological tour… which is not actually the case. It’s mostly the story of a father-son road trip, the attempt of a grown man to peel the layers away from his aging father to see why he was so “out there,” so unconventional, such an enigma in his life growing up. His father was a naturalist of sorts, and one of his lifetime passions (it's a passion when you can barely eke a living out of it) was surveying the surviving numbers of the endangered copperbelly water snake in remote areas in southern Michigan. After living through his father's substance abuse, a messy divorce, and a childhood salvaged by the more reliable care (and income) of his teacher mother, the author approaches his father later in life to try to understand him better and repair their tattered relationship. He meets him in his former swampy stomping grounds, where he gets an idea and a reluctant apprecia...