Jussi Alder-Olsen and More

Will you be anywhere near Minneapolis on June 1st? Then you should head over to Once Upon a Crime at 7pm where Jussi Adler-Olsen will be making a rare appearance and signing his third Department Q book to be translated into English (titled A Conspiracy of Faith on this side of the pond and Redemption in the UK. The Danish title, which means Message in a Bottle, is better, but unfortunately a lesser author with a big reputation has already used it.)  Once Upon a Crime is always worth a visit, whatever the date is. This is a special gig for a special store – Alder-Olsen will only be appearing at four bookstores on this tour. I’m so happy my local is one of them.

I hope to have a review of A Conspiracy of Faith posted here soon. I enjoyed it very much for the same reasons I enjoyed The Keeper of Lost Causes.

Karen Meek has compiled a terrific list of books that will be eligible for the next Petrona award. Lots to look forward to. I’m particularly happy to see another Gunnar Staalesen novel translated, as well as another book by Jorn Lier Horst (an author Maxine particularly enjoyed, as I recall). And there are some new-to-me authors as well.

At the sibling blog, Petrona Remembered, I run through Asa Larsson’s series, culminating in my favorite of her books, Until Thy Wrath Be Past. Norm reprises his review of Red Wolf by Liza Marklund and compares Marklund’s heroine and the Girl of the Millennium Trilogy.

At Crime Scraps, Norm reviews Liza Marklund’s latest novel, Lifetime, and finds it an exciting read with a very human woman protagonist (who he wishes had better taste in men).

Sarah also reviews the novel at Crime Pieces, and loved both the storyline, the diversions into the newsroom where Annika works and its troubles, as well as further developments in the reporter’s complicated home life, writing “ultimately Annika is the reason, I suspect, a lot of people read Marklund’s books and I think she fast becoming one of my favourite characters in crime fiction.”

Whereas I find her chaotic home life a bit exasperating, and say in my review at Reviewing the Evidence, “in the end, the prickly, emotional, and vulnerable Annika takes a back seat to her identity as a confident and professional journalist. Similarly, the novel is at its best when the mystery nudges the personal drama into the background and takes center stage.” Which is a much more measured way of saying that I just want to smack her.

Charles Finch at USA Today does not roll out the welcome mat for Jo Nebo’s The Redeemer, finally hitting shelves in the US. He calls it both plodding and interminable, and confesses right up front, “I can’t stand Nesbø’s books. That includes The Redeemer, which, like his earlier novels, strikes me as pat, lurid and, above all dull, moving at a fatally sedate pace.” He acknowledges that his opinion is not shared by all. (That includes me. He thinks The Snowman is the best, and I thought it the least imaginative and interesting. I liked The Redeemer much better. Also, why would you assign a review to someone who doesn’t like an author’s work? It’s a mystery.)

Glenn Harper at International Crime Fiction reviews Mons Kallentoft’s Summertime Death, which he finds rather annoying for a variety of reasons, including the irrationally dreadful behavior of the police (which is less convincing and interesting as another book in which the police behave rather appallingly, Lief G. W. Persson’s Linda, as in the Linda Murder.) He has also had enough, already, of those loquacious dead people.  

For contrast, see his previous review of Linda, as in the Linda Murder, which focuses on the most appallingly awful of his detectives, Ewart Bäckström, who takes very little interest in the crime he’s investigating, though other detectives nudge the case forward. He advises,

One of Bäckström’s spectacular failings is his attitude toward women, sometimes kept to himself and sometimes revealed openly. If you find his attitude more annoying than comic, trust me–you should stick with the book. Increasingly through the last third of the novel and with considerable impact at the very end, the author brings the story and Bäckström’s sexism (and not only his sexism) into stark focus.

In the end, the book is long, non-linear, a bit demanding, but extremely rewarding. i may have to give Persson another chance.

Jose Ignacio Escribano reviews Hakan Nesser’s Borkmann’s Point at The Game’s Afoot. Esta entrada es bilingüe, which I believe means “Jose Ignacio is far cleverer than I am.” He enjoyed it a great deal and recommends the entire series, particularly for its dialogue.

Ms. Wordopolis reads Anne Holt’s Blessed are Those Who Thirst, The story is a high-energy look at both the affect of a rape on the victim and police work in a time of austerity, when the system is swamped and angry citizens are tempted to take things into their own hands. She writes, “sometimes in the course of a police procedural I lose sight of the crime at the center of the novel and become more wrapped up in the chase for the perpetrator, but that didn’t happen while I read this novel.” She adds that Holt did a great job of portraying the work of civil servants in a realistic way.

Raven Crime reads Quentin Bates’s third Gunna Gisladottir mystery, Chilled to the Bone. Though the author, Quentin Bates, no longer lives in Iceland, he does a great job of creating the sort of woman who might actually investigate crimes there, a down-to-earth mother and soon-to-be grandmother who, quoth the Raven, is “defined by her professionalism and absolute determination to get to the heart of the investigation, but carries an aura of calmness and self-deprecation which instils confidence in her colleagues and victims alike.” She finds the balance of police procedural, personal life, humor and seriousness to be just right.

Sarah at Crimepieces points out that Gaute Heivoll’s Before I Burn is about a crime, but isn’t crime fiction. It’s the fictional memoir of a Norwegian whose village was torched by an arsonist. In adulthood, he moves to Oslo, but is drawn home when his father is taken ill. She says it’s beautifully written and thought-provoking. Just don’t expect it to be shelved in the crime fiction section.

Col adds Camilla Lackberg’s The Stranger (apa The Gallows Bird) to his criminal library at the urging of his wife, who liked it quite a bit more than he did. He found some of the characters cliched and (like me!) dislikes hooks inserted at the end, lures for the next book. I particularly like the way he concluded his review: “my 2012 edition states that the author was the 9^th best-selling author in Europe in the previous year. She must have a very big family, I reckon.”

At Euro Crime, Susan White reviews a new book by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom, Two Soldiers, which portrays the rise of youth gangs and how membership in the gang family distorts young lives. It sounds quite as harrowing as their previous work.

Previously at Euro Crime, Raven Crime (aka JF) reviewed The Weeping Girl by Hakan Nesser, Though it continues the van Veeteren series, he steps aside and lets Ewa Moreno take the lead, which she does without missing a step. Great characters, just the right amount of humor, and an involving case make it a book worth reading.

Review of The Healer by Antti Tuomainen

Set in Helsinki in a dystopian future, when global warming has advanced to the point that anyone who can afford it has moved north to heavily-fortified compounds, social services are failing in the face of crime, disease, and chaos, and the rain never stops, a poet is searching for his wife, who has disappeared while following a story. She’s a journalist investigating a string of murders committed by a man who calls himself The Healer, who is targeting those who he believes are responsible for crimes against nature. Tapani Lehtinen is sure something bad has happened to Johanna, but he knows there is little the police can or will do. They are barely able to investigate homicides, much less missing persons. Yet Lehtinen is able to make an alliance of sorts with Harri Jaatinen, a tired police inspector who knows Johanna and thinks she was on to something. He gives Lehtinen what he knows about The Healer. Both of them are persistent in spite of having very little to give them hope. 

The novel is not entirely successful as crime fiction.Our narrator is most definitely an amateur sleuth, though he has some of the trappings of the hardboiled PI. He stumbles upon clues, makes leaps that are based more on coincidence and convenience than detection, falls into fugue states where he reminisces about his relationship with Johanna. He’s aided by Hamid, a cab driver who has migrated to Finland as part of a  mass migration northward, who is fortuitously able to provide Lehtinen with help at critical times. 

But that’s okay. The plot — the search for Johanna and her involvement with The Healer — is not the driving force of the novel. Rather, its the vision of a not-so-distant future in which a poet and a policeman have very little to sustain them other than a belief that they must go on, doing what they believe in. Jaatinen is sustained by his work. (“I’m a policeman. I believe in what I do.”) Lehtinen’s love for his wife — and his poetic belief in the importance of love — is his major motivation. This is in contrast to The Healer, whose fanaticism is blind and violent. 

In one passage, an angry character sketches out how the world got to such a terminal state. After a period of idealistic activism, the public mood turned to radicalism, followed by “disillusioned withdrawal … that fight was won by big business–in other words, a few thousand people who were already superrich, who once again masked their own interests in the mantle of economic growth for the common good. The return to the old ways was echoed by the desire of a populace tired of momentary scarcity, of consuming less, to live like they had before: self-absorbed, greedy, and irresponsible–the way they’d always been taught to live.” 

In the end, both radical responses to environmental catastrophe and individualistic consumerism turn out to have more in common than Lehtinen’s more modest belief in trying to do the right thing and in the power of his love for Johanna. There’s something very likable about Lehtinen, who seems quintessentially Finnish in a Finland that has changed beyond recognition.

Antii Tuomainen started his writing career in advertising. The Healer, his third novel, won the Clue Award for best Finnish crime novel. It is being translated into 26 languages. I got an advanced copy through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. The Healer, translated by Lola Rogers, will be released in the US in May, 2013. 

Happy Easter Crime!

creative commons licensed photo courtesy of Rockspilden

The Spectator has a fascinating article about the origins of Påskekrim, Norway’s tradition of reading crime fiction at Easter. It seems a couple of enterprising guerrilla marketers of the late 19th century placed and ad for their novel about a train robbery that looked very like a news headline in Aftenposten. A tradition was born. As Norwegians head to their country cottages for the holidays, they take candy and entertaining books with them. The article goes on to profile worthy Norwegian writers, Anne Holt and Jørn Lier Horst, as well as a selection of Swedish and Danish recommendations.

The Newtown Review of Books, from Sydney, Australia, has a detailed review of Antti Tuomainen’s dystopian futuristic thriller set in Helsinki, The Healer.  Jean Bedford concludes, “ it is the juxtaposition of the rather gallant existentialism of the protagonists with the self-preservation and venality of most of the other characters that adds depth and texture to raise this dystopian crime novel well out of the ordinary.”

I have a copy on its way to me, and I am looking forward to it. In an email to me, critic Paula Arvas wrote “it’s one piece of quality crime writing!” She also recommends Pekka Hiltunen’s Cold Courage which will be out in June. For more from Finland, see the website of the FELT Cooperative.

At Reviewing the Evidence, there are several Scandinavian crime novels reviewed this week. John Cleal finds Mons Kallentoft’s Autumn Killing complex, dark, splendidly written, and a bit of work for the reader – but well worth it.

Yvonne Klein finds some of the plot devices in Silenced, Kristina Ohlsson’s second novel, awfully shopworn, and isn’t taken with the characters, though the book does provide a picture of Swedish approaches to justice.

Anne Corey is enthusiastic about Helsinki Blood, the latest brutal and dark entry in James Thompson’s Kari Vaara series. (Thompson is an American living in Finland, where his books were first published.) Though it focuses on Vaara’s attempts to salvage a what’s left of his life after the violence of the previous book in the series, it ends on a hopeful note and a possible new direction for the series.

In an earlier issue of RTE, I reviewed Tursten’s Golden Calf, which I felt was a strong entry in the series that has interesting things to say about the way wealth distorts people’s values.

Jose Ignacio Escribano reviews Arne Dahl’s Misterioso (apa The Blinded Man) finding it well-written, intelligent, a tad slow in places, and very much in the social critique tradition of SJowall and Wahloo.  The BBC is airing a television series based on Dahl’s Intercrime novels starting in April. (Hat tip to Euro Crime.)

He previously reviewed Last Will by Liza Marklund, which he gives top marks, saying it’s an engrossing story that does a good job of weaving together the investigation and Annika Bengtzon’s personal life.

Margot Kinberg puts Jørn Lier Horst’s Dregs in the spotlight – part of her series in which she examines how a particular mystery works in depth. This episode is dedicated to Maxine Clarke, who was one of the first to review this book.

At Crimepieces, Sarah Ward reviews Alexander Söderberg’s Andalucian Friend, which she enjoyed – with reservations. The story’s strength is in its well-drawn characters, but the non-stop action and attendant hype left her wondering what all the fuss is about.

More reviews of Söderberg’s novel can be found at The Book Reporter (which finds it an epic powerhouse of a novel), Metro (which is less enamored, finding the female lead lacking and the violence over the top), and Kirkus (which deems it promising but with issues).

The Killer’s Art by Mari Jungstedt: A Review

The fourth entry in the Anders Knutas series, translated by Tiina Nunnelly, has recently been published by Stockholm Text for the US market. (It appeared in the UK back in 2010.) Like others in the series, it is a police procedural set on the island of Gotland with a television news team adding a secondary set of investigators into the mix.

In The Killer’s Art, a successful art dealer prepares to make a major life change after an exhibit of a talented young artist. However, someone has other plans, and Egon Wallin’s body is found hanging from Dalman’s gate, part of Visby’s historic wall. Clearly, he isn’t the victim of a suicide. Someone very strong killed him and made a display of it – which, in a way, is appropriate for a story that is largely about the art world.

photo courtesy of Erik Cleves Christensen

At first, the story is a bit fractured, with short scenes from various points of view needing to be assembled by the reader. It’s a bit of a relief when Knutas arrives to take charge of the investigation. He  is soon joined by journalist Johann Berg and photographer Pia Lilja, whose dramatic photo of the hanged man quickly appears on the front page of newspapers across Sweden. Each team digs away at the art dealer’s past, which includes a cache of stolen paintings and a plan to leave his wife.

We also get to know some art dealers who knew the murder victim, one of whom has a drinking problem and a taste for rough sex and for a painting by a famous Swedish artist which is later stolen in a daring and well-planned heist. From time to time, we see the action from the perspective of Egon Wallin’s killer, driven by his own impassioned if murky motivation. We also get to learn more about the ongoing work and family relationships of the recurring characters.

The story is complex but the investigation unfolds nicely, However, the the dependence on the kind of “deviance” depicted in the painting plays too heavy-handed a role in the motivation of the crime and the relationships that lead to it. I also am tired of family members of the sleuths being drawn into the case to increase the drama.

That said, I enjoyed the book once Knutas arrived on the scene, and the scenery as always was a pleasure. This series is part of the shocking-violence-in-pastoral-settings school of Swedish crime, landing it somewhere between the excellent novels by Johann Theorin set on the neighboring island of Oland and the fluffy serial killer dramas by Camilla Lackberg, set on an island on the other side of Sweden. Jungstedt doesn’t strive for Mankell’s social criticism, and doesn’t write with Theorin’s poetic style. Her work is more modestly meant to entertain, and on the whole she succeeds.

Incidentally, Publishing Perspectives has just published an interesting profile of Stockholm Text, the innovative publisher of the US edition. (Hat tip to Rebecka K and the FriendFeed Crime and Mystery Fiction room.)

 

Petrona Award and more

It’s official: The Petrona Award for the best Scandinavian crime novel of the year has announced its very first shortlist and judges. The finalist will be announced at Crimefest.  From the press release:

The Petrona Award has been established to celebrate the work of Maxine Clarke, one of the first online crime fiction reviewers and bloggers, who died in December 2012. Maxine, whose online persona and blog was called Petrona, was passionate about translated crime fiction but in particular that from the Scandinavian countries.

The shortlist for the 2013 award, which is based on Maxine’s reviews and ratings is as follows:

PIERCED by Thomas Enger, tr. Charlotte Barslund (Faber and Faber)

BLACK SKIES by Arnaldur Indridason, tr. Victoria Cribb (Harvill Secker)
LAST WILL by Liza Marklund, tr. Neil Smith (Corgi)
ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER LIFE by Leif GW Persson tr. Paul Norlen (Doubleday)

The judges are an erudite and very well-read group – Barry Forshaw, Kat Hall (aka Mrs. Peabody), and Sarah Ward. Find more about the award at Petrona Remembered.

Sarah Ward reviews Sjowall and Wahloo’s The Locked Room at Crimepieces. It’s the eighth in the series and perhaps not the strongest, but Sarah enjoyed the sly ending. She also reviews Leif G. W. Persson’s Linda, as in the Linda Murder, which features Evert Backstrom, who is “compelling and abhorrent. Sexist, racist, homophobic, facetious, work-shy, dismissive of his team . . . and very, very funny,” making her predict readers will either love or loathe this unusual novel.

Jose Ignacio Escribano offers a bilingual review of Anne Holt’s The Blind Goddess, which was the first in the Hanne Wilhelmsen series, though he points out there really are multiple protagonists, rather like the Martin Beck series (a very interesting parallel). Originally published in 1993, this novel won the Riverton prize as best Norwegian crime novel of the year.

Glenn Harper has some good things to say about Lars Kepler’s The Hypnotist, and some criticism, particularly of the flashbacks that bog down the pacing and some cliched characters.

Bernadette reviews Mons Kallentoft’s second seasonally-themed procedural, Summertime Death, and reports that the weather is frightful – hot, muggy, and very well-depicted, as was the cold in the first book. However the novel doesn’t score as well on plot, character development, or plausibility and the inclusion (once again) of voices from beyond the grave doesn’t help.

She fares better with Arnaldur Indridason’s Black Skies, which uses the sidekick Sigurdur Oli as its main character, with Erlendur off somewhere for reasons unclear. Though Sigurdur Oli is a pretty average bloke, he turns out to be quite complex – as does that plot, which appears fairly straightforward until you try to summarize it, at which point the author’s narrative skills in layering lots of material without cluttering things up becomes apparent. (I so want to read this book!)

Col (who has decided to review at least on Scandinavian mystery a month – hurrah) has high praise for an earlier book in the series, The Draining Lake, which does a good job of layering stories from different time periods.  

Col adds Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire to his criminal library and gives it mixed marks, with the action-packed second-half making up for a slow and plodding start. He liked it enough to read the third.

NancyO reviews Helene Tursten’s The Golden Calf, which she felt was a bit disappointing in the end, though the pacing and the character of Sana, a spoilt child-woman who doesn’t help the police figure things out, was well drawn.

Raven Crime Reads also has review of the book, and now plans to catch up on the earlier volumes, having found it a well-crafted procedural that is less gloomy than many Nordic novels.

Harry Hole gets around. There’s a review of The Phantom in the Philippine Daily Inquirer by Ruel S. De Vera, who finds it darkly intoxicating.

Marilyn Stasio of the New York Times was not terribly impressed by Alexander Soderberg’s The Andalusian Friend, which she thinks might have been amusing if written by Donald Westlake rather than treated seriously.

The New York Public Library has a roundup of the usual suspects of Nordic crime fiction, with links to audio pronouncing names that I know I mangle often enough. Especially Sjowall and Wahloo! (Hat tip to Sarah Ward.)

The Guardian reports that a series based on Arne Dahl’s Intercrime series will be broadcast in the UK by the BBC. Let’s hope this will spur on translations. It took years and years for Misterioso to finally appear in English.

Bitch Magazine has an interesting article by Soraya Roberts on the Scandinavian-feminist take on the standard tropes of film noir, including in her analysis the Millennium Trilogy, Forbrydelsen (The Killing), Borgen, and Bron/Broen (The Bridge).  She concludes

The importance of noir heroines like Lisbeth Salander, Sarah Lund, Saga Norén, and Birgitte Nyborg Christensen is not only to put women on an equal footing with men—we can be just as work obsessed and as socially inept as you—but, more important, to change the traditional view of women as victims. By updating the women in noir from sex objects and victims to protectors—of both women and men—Nordic noir series are setting a precedent for other genres to accept. If the trench coat fits, a hero is a hero regardless of gender.

An article in Slate by techno-skeptic EvgenyMorozov tipped me off to an intriguing website that eschews algorithms and instead asks various prominent folks for their book recommendations, humanizing curation and perhaps doing it better. FiveBooks asks Jo Nesbo which novels he recommends and the answers are interesting (and not what one might expect. Or perhaps even find particularly rewarding in every case. Rivington, for example, is … well, for example may be exactly how to put it, as an important historical contributor to Norwegian crime whose stories, according to Nesbo, very much reflect the tastes of his time. (NB: quite a few of us use humans as curators. I suspect most readers are far more responsive to and satisfied by “you might also like” statements when they come from friends.)

The Killer’s Art and Killer Covers

This week, Stockholm Text launched the US publication of Mari Jungstedt’s The Killer’s Art. This volume in the Anders Knutas series was previously published in the UK back in 2010. Stockholm Text is doing some interesting things in bringing translations from Swedish to the English market. I was struck by the very different cover art.

Here’s the UK edition from Doubleday. It has clouds, trees, water – a moody outdoor scene.  Nothing unusual, really.

And here is the artwork that Stockholm Text came up with.

The new cover is striking and rather disturbing. The sculptural head seems to be simultaneously being formed out of molten red-hot metal and eaten away from below, as if by acid. It’s dark and moody, like the UK cover, but conveys a very different feel.

I had hoped to read the book in time to review it at its US launch, but life got in the way. Someday, I will see how well these covers match the story inside. Meanwhile, here are some reviews others have written of The Killer’s Art:

• Peter at Nordic Bookblog
• Mysterious Reviews
• Leslie Gilbert Elman at Criminal Element
• Jane Jakeman at The Independent
• Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise 
• Maxine Clarke at Euro Crime
• Norm at Crime Scraps
• Glenn Harper at International Noir Fiction
• Michael Carlson at Irresistible Targets

 

 

 

 

 

Petrona Remembered and a belated round-up

It has been a long time since I posted here; apologies. I will try to catch up with some reviews and commentary that has appeared since November. But first, I hope everyone who loves the genre will take note of Karen Meek’s post at EuroCrime, inviting contributions to Petrona Remembered.

I haven’t posted here since the sad news of Maxine Clarke’s death appeared at the FriendFeed room she created. Maxine was an editor and innovator at Nature, which is probably the most prestigious science journal being published today. It doesn’t rest on its laurels but has constantly explored new media, testing out innovative ways to communicate science. She was at the forefront of this work and transferred that know-how to building out the online potential for mystery lovers to connect and share. She was not only an active blogger, she encouraged others by responding to their blog posts and comments, letting us know about new technologies and new publications – and generally showing us all how to do it well.

She will be missed by all of us, but we are fortunate that some of her friends are doing something about it. An award for the best Scandinavian crime novel translated into English is being established in her name. (She was not only well-read in Scandinavian crime, she was one of its finest critics.)

More immediately, the Petrona Remembered site will collect via email contributions about mysteries we love, building a collection of book recommendations and celebrations. I can’t think of a better tribute. So . . . go do that now. I’ll wait.

You’re back? Okay, here are some reviews and bits of news about Scandinavian crime fiction from the past few months.

At my book discussion hangout, aptly named 4_mystery_addicts, our resident Finnish expert mentioned some upcoming translations: “Antti Tuomainen’s sci fi/crime novel The Healer will be published next year, as will be Pekka Hiltunen’s Cold Courage about two Finnish women living in London involved in crimes.” He also mentioned some authors who have yet to be translated, whose names I have added to the Wanted page.

In fact, there’s a review of Tuomainen’s The Healer in Metro which makes the dystopian eco-thriller sound quite good. “Tuomainen conjures up in spare, softly poetic prose the collapse of social order and human decency in the face of environmental havoc.”

Alan Bradley bemoans the decline of weather as a feature in Anglophone mysteries and wonders if that’s why Scandinavian crime is so popular – it’s literally chilling.

The New York Public Library’s blog offered a catalog of crime, Scandinavian-style.

Kristina Ohlsson’s Silenced gets a strong review in the Toronto Globe and Mail, where Margaret Cannon says the series “deserves to go on for a long time.”

The Witchita Eagle has a postive review of Jo Nebso’s Phantom, concluding “While “The Snowman” is creepy, and “The Leopard” a bit over-the-top, “Phantom” is a more balanced, surer effort.

There is, apparently, a good television series based on Arne Dahl’s series, according to International Noir Fiction. And while we are talking about the small screen, Karen Meek bring news that Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Department Q series is being produced in Denmark. Those Danes have been making some excellent television lately.

J. Kingston Pierce picks Helene Tursten’s latest translation, The Golden Calf as his Rap Sheet pick of the week. (I thought it was a very strong entry in the series, and have to get cracking on a review.)

Peter at the Nordic Book Blog reviews Helene Tursten’s Night Rounds, an earlier book in the series, and finds it “entertaining, suspenseful, and well-written” with one of his favorite heroines at its center.

Jose Ignacio Escribano reviews Pierced by Thomas Enger, finding it a a strong followup to the author’s first book. He recommends it highly in both English and Spanish. He also tips us off to the news that Anne Holt is ending the Stubo and Vik series, which makes me sad as I avoided it for ages (profilers! No!) and have found it amazingly good. On the other hand, the BBC is going to film a series based on her Hanne Wilhelmsen, so I should be too glum.

Kerrie in paradise reviews Camilla Ceder’s Babylon, which she found enjoyable but not particularly remarkable.

Norm at Crimescraps reviews Blessed are Those Who Thirst by Anne Holt and finds he’s ready to enjoy Nordic crime again. Though the novel is short, the characters are well-developed and intriguing. He’d grown jaded by too much gloomy sameness, but this recent translation of a 1994 novel hit the spot.

And I’ll leave it there for now. Don’t forget to submit your beloved mystery memories to Petrona Remembered.