1222: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel (Trans 2011 by Marlaine Delargy) by Anne Holt

Trapped in a snowbound Norwegian hotel as a blizzard rages and a murderer prowls, retired police inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen is reminded of one of Agatha Christie's most satisfying novels: "Twenty-four hours ago, there were 269 people on board a train. Then we became 196. When two men died, we were 194. Now there were only 118 of us left. I thought about Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. I immediately tried to dismiss the thought. And Then There Were None is a story that doesn't exactly have a happy ending."There's a definite Christie-ish flavour to Anne Holt's 1222, and the author has even described the book as a homage to the queen of crime.
The latest in the swarm of Scandinavian thrillers to hit our shores in the wake of Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, it is distinctly less grisly than its predecessors, preferring to focus on the puzzle rather than the murders, and leading up to a wonderfully Poirot-esque I've-figured-it-all-out speech from Hanne.
After a train crashes high in the Norwegian mountains, the survivors, wounded but initially optimistic, battle their way through the snow to a nearby hotel, 1,222 metres above sea level. As the temperature falls and the tension between factions – a Muslim couple and a shrill right-wing television presenter, hoodied youths and shady businessmen – rises, people start to die, and it's up to Hanne to puzzle out what is essentially an icy version of the locked-room mystery.
Paralysed from the waist down after a bullet hit her in the spine, Wilhelmsen is as enjoyably antisocial as the best detectives always seem to be, while the presence of an armed guard on the top floor of the hotel, concealing something – or someone – which had been hidden in the sealed last carriage of the train, adds extra spice to the mystery. Holt depicts the mounting blizzard with a sure hand, the "snow so deep that there was no one alive who could remember anything like it", the "immense covering of air and frozen water that stretched from Hallingdal to Flåm".

 

 

Thanks to The Guardian.

Indian Bride (2001 Trans 2005) by Karin Fossum

When perpetual bachelor Gunder Jomann goes to India for two weeks and comes home married, the town of Elvestad is stunned. On the day the Indian bride is supposed to arrive, the battered body of a woman is found in a meadow on the outskirts of town. None of the "good people of Elvestad" can believe that anyone among them would be capable of such a brutal murder. But in his quiet, formal way, Inspector Konrad Sejer understands that good people can commit atrocious deeds, and that no one is altogether innocent—including the café owner who knows too much, the girl who wants to be a chief witness, and the bodybuilder with no outlet for his terrible strength.

Another brilliantly conceived, dark novel from one of Europe’s most successful crime writers.

Thanks to Goodreads

The water's edge (2009 ) by Karin Fossum

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The Water's Edge (Inspector Konrad Sejer #8)

The Wate

A married couple, Reinhardt and Kristine Ris, are out for a Sunday walk when they discover the body of a boy and see the figure of a man limping away. They alert the police, but not before Reinhardt, to Kristine’s horror, kneels down and takes photographs of the dead child with his cell phone. Inspectors Konrad Sejer and Jakob Skarre begin to make inquiries in the little t A married couple, Reinhardt and Kristine Ris, are out for a Sunday walk when they discover the body of a boy and see the figure of a man limping away. They alert the police, but not before Reinhardt, to Kristine’s horror, kneels down and takes photographs of the dead child with his cell phone. Inspectors Konrad Sejer and Jakob Skarre begin to make inquiries in the little town of Solberglia. But then another boy disappears, and an explanation seems more remote than ever. Meanwhile, the Ris’s marriage starts to unravel as Reinhardt becomes obsessed with the tragic events and his own part in them.

A riveting portrayal of a community—its insiders, its outsiders, its fissures, and its secrets—from Norway’s "Queen of Crime," Karin Fossum.   

Thanks to Goodreads.

The Sandman (2012 Trans 2016) by Lars Kepler

It’s become almost axiomatic in recent years that just about any crime fiction by just about any Scandinavian will be dark, complex, enthralling, and generally brilliant.
The arithmetic-minded might also suppose that crime fiction written by two Scandinavians together is bound to be twice as dark, complex, enthralling, and brilliant as a one-author Scandinavian crime novel.
The Sandman, although it has already hit some best-seller lists, achieves some reverse math.
It would be wrong to say it’s only half as fine as its peers, but it is fair to say that Lars Kepler is, say, no Jo Nesbo.
In fact, Lars Kepler is — are? — actually Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril and Alexander Ahndoril, a married couple — each of whom also conducts a solo writing career under her and his own name.
Together, they produce the Kepler series featuring police officer Joona Linna, of which The Sandman is the fourth entry.
Its opening is terrific.
A young man is stumbling in a snowstorm toward Stockholm over a railway bridge. He is Mikael Kohler-Frost, and he has been missing for 13 years, along with his sister.
He was declared dead seven years ago, although his father, a successful novelist, has never quite given up hope that his children are still alive.
His reappearance obviously comes as a shock to not only his father, but also to police, who have figured the two youngsters were among the many victims of a superlatively vicious and dangerous serial kidnapper and killer named Jurek Walter.
For years, Walter has been stashed in hyper-secure conditions in the psychiatric wing of a Stockholm prison, his victims all presumed dead.
He’s so shrewd and sinister, a Silence of the Lambs sort of character, that no one is allowed to be in his presence alone — a rule that anyone can see will be broken, if it hasn’t been already, by some naive, hapless, or corrupt soul.
Mikael’s reappearance in the world puts a desperately new spin on the Walter case, though.
The young man has a terrible tale to tell of years spent, with his sister, in the darkness of a small bunker, sustained by meagre supplies from the hands of someone unknown.
Mikael has never seen the person, but refers to him as the Sandman, for his methods of sleeping-drug dispensing.
When, inexplicably, Mikael gets a chance to escape, his sister is left behind, which adds considerably to the urgency of figuring out where she is, where other still-missing and possibly dead or alive victims may be and, also crucially, who Walter’s long-unrecognized accomplice may be.
Because clearly he has had one, or Mikael and his sister would long since have died without sustenance.
Jurek Walter’s arrest years back came at the hands of series protagonist Detective Inspector Joona Linna, who is especially haunted — and eager — because Walter once took revenge on the family of a police colleague, and now may be threatening Linna’s family, as well.
And so the fraught and frantic investigation rushes on.
The Sandman has plenty of speed, suspense, and twists of plot, as well as the ever-popular gore, menace and awesome cruelty.
But in characterization, plotting, resolution and style, it’s like a 490-page mass-market knock-off of the real couturiers of Scandinavian crime fiction — propelled not by its particular substance, but by the barely camouflaged technique, both easy and simple, of flat, declarative sentences within short, snappy, onrushing paragraphs.

Thanks to Joan Barfoot, a novelist living in London

The stone-cutter (2004 trans. 2008) by Camilla Lackberg

One of the series featuring local detective, Patrick Hedstrom and his wife-to-be Erika.  Set in Fjallbacka a 7 year old girl is found dead in the harbour.  Efforts to find her murderer opens up nasty behaviours by many - her father, his father and his wife's mother, Lilian.  The past was cruel to Lilian. Is that why she poisoned both her husbands and killed the granddaughter.

Dislike the hosrtor component of the story.  And I was a history major!

Skylight confession (2007) by Alice Hoffman

Red haired Arlyn met her husband after her father dies. Fate brought the man to her house.  She then perused him at the university and his home.  They married. Then her 6 year old son, Sam, dis poorly after she dies of cancer.  But Arlyn's ghost appeared to the father and to the new nanny, who kept the family together.  Blanca loved her brother Sam, even though she was 6 ears younger, Sam became a drug addict while years later Blanca discovered that her "father'' was not her father.  Sam lost his life to drugs.

Death of a nightingale (2013) by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnette Friss

The authors

Nina. Natasha. Olga. Three women united by one terrifying secret. But only one of them has killed to keep it.

Natasha Doroshenko, a Ukrainian woman who has been convicted of the attempted murder of her Danish fiancé, escapes police custody on her way to an interrogation in Copenhagen's police headquarters. That night, the frozen, tortured body of Michael, the ex-fiancé, is found in a car, and the manhunt for Natasha escalates. It isn't the first time the young Ukrainian woman has lost a partner to violent ends: her first husband was also murdered, three years earlier in Kiev, and in the same manner: tortured to death in a car.

Danish Red Cross nurse Nina Borg has been following Natasha's case for several years now, since Natasha first took refuge at a crisis center where Nina works. Nina, who had tried to help Natasha leave her abusive fiancé more than once, just can't see the young Ukrainian mother as a vicious killer. But in her effort to protect Natasha's daughter and discover the truth, Nina realizes there is much she didn't know about this woman and her past. The mystery has long and bloody roots, going back to a terrible famine that devastated Stalinist Ukraine in 1934, when a ten-year-old girl with the voice of a nightingale sang her family into shallow graves.  

Madness: A bipolar life (20^^) by Marya Hornbacher

An astonishing dispatch from inside the belly of bipolar disorder, reflecting major new insights

When Marya Hornbacher published her first book, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, she did not yet have the piece of shattering knowledge that would finally make sense of the chaos of her life. At age twenty-four, Hornbacher was diagnosed with Type I rapid-cycle bipolar, An astonishing dispatch from inside the belly of bipolar disorder, reflecting major new insights

When Marya Hornbacher published her first book, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, she did not yet have the piece of shattering knowledge that would finally make sense of the chaos of her life. At age twenty-four, Hornbacher was diagnosed with Type I rapid-cycle bipolar, the most severe form of bipolar disorder.

In Madness, in her trademark wry and utterly self-revealing voice, Hornbacher tells her new story. Through scenes of astonishing visceral and emotional power, she takes us inside her own desperate attempts to counteract violently careening mood swings by self-starvation, substance abuse, numbing sex, and self-mutilation. How Hornbacher fights her way up from a madness that all but destroys her, and what it is like to live in a difficult and sometimes beautiful life and marriage -- where bipolar always beckons -- is at the center of this brave and heart-stopping memoir.

Madness delivers the revelation that Hornbacher is not alone: millions of people in America today are struggling with a variety of disorders that may disguise their bipolar disease. And Hornbacher's fiercely self-aware portrait of her own bipolar as early as age four will powerfully change, too, the current debate on whether bipolar in children actually exists.

Ten years after Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind, this storm of a memoir will revolutionize our understanding of bipolar disorder.

An event in autumn: A Kurt Wallander mystery (2014) by Henninng Mankell

An Inspector Kurt Wallander short novel by the bestselling author Henning Mankell, available in English for the first time. A Vintage Canada Original.
Soon after Inspector Kurt Wallander moves into a new house with a charming garden, he makes an upsetting discovery: there is a hand--indeed, an entire corpse--buried in a shallow grave in the garden. It's the responsibility of the local police to handle the investigation...but Wallander, even though busy with another case, is soon drawn into the search for the truth about his new home, and its previous owner.

Thanks to Goodreads!

The considerate killer (#4) 2016 by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis

The thrilling final installment of the New York Times bestselling Nina Borg series set in Denmark

Scandinavian crime series In an attempt to save their marriage, Nina Borg and her husband traveled to a beach resort in the Philippines for a dream vacation. Only now, six months later, does Nina begin to understand the devastating repercussions of that trip—repercussions that have followed her home across the globe to Denmark. On an icy winter day, she is attacked outside the grocery store. The last thing she hears before losing consciousness is her assailant asking her forgiveness. Only later does she understand that this isn’t for what he’s just done, but for what he plans to do to.

As Nina tries to trace the origin of sinister messages she’s received, she realizes the attempt on her life must be linked to events in Manila, and to three young men whose dangerous friendship started in medical school. Time and circumstance have forced them to make impossible choices that have cost human lives.

It’s a long way from Viborg to Manila, and yet Nina and her pursuer face the same dilemma: How far will they go to save themselves?  

Thanks to Goodreads!

The unquiet dead by Ausma Zehanat Khan

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TheDespite their many differences, Detective Rachel Getty trusts her boss, Esa Khattak, implicitly. But she's still uneasy at Khattak's tight-lipped secrecy when he asks her to look into Christopher Drayton's death. Drayton's apparently accidental fall from a cliff doesn't seem to warrant a police investigation, particularly not from Rachel and Khattak's team, which handles m   Despite their many differences, Detective Rachel Getty trusts her boss, Esa Khattak, implicitly. But she's still uneasy at Khattak's tight-lipped secrecy when he asks her to look into Christopher Drayton's death. Drayton's apparently accidental fall from a cliff doesn't seem to warrant a police investigation, particularly not from Rachel and Khattak's team, which handles minority-sensitive cases. But when she learns that Drayton may have been living under an assumed name, Rachel begins to understand why Khattak is tip-toeing around this case. It soon comes to light that Drayton may have been a war criminal with ties to the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.

If that's true, any number of people might have had reason to help Drayton to his death, and a murder investigation could have far-reaching ripples throughout the community. But as Rachel and Khattak dig deeper into the life and death of Christopher Drayton, every question seems to lead only to more questions, with no easy answers. Had the specters of Srebrenica returned to haunt Drayton at the end, or had he been keeping secrets of an entirely different nature? Or, after all, did a man just fall to his death from the Bluffs?

In her spellbinding debut, Ausma Zehanat Khan has written a complex and provocative story of loss, redemption, and the cost of justice that will linger with readers long after turning the final page.

 

Thanks to Goodreads

The language of secrets by Asuma Zehanat Khan (2016)

Detective Esa Khattak heads up Canada's Community Policing Section, which handles minority-sensitive cases across all levels of law enforcement. Khattak is still under scrutiny for his last case, so he's surprised when INSET, Canada's federal intelligence agency, calls him in on another potentially hot button issue. For months, INSET has been investigating a local terrorist cell which is planning an attack on New Year's Day. INSET had an informant, Mohsin Dar, undercover inside the cell. But now, just weeks before the attack, Mohsin has been murdered at the group's training camp deep in the woods.

INSET wants Khattak to give the appearance of investigating Mohsin's death, and then to bury the lead. They can't risk exposing their operation, or Mohsin's role in it. But Khattak used to know Mohsin, and he knows he can't just let this murder slide. So Khattak sends his partner, Detective Rachel Getty, undercover into the small-town mosque which houses the terrorist cell. As Rachel tentatively reaches out into the unfamiliar world of Islam, and begins developing relationships with the people of the mosque and the terrorist cell within it, the potential reasons for Mohsin's murder only seem to multiply, from the political and ideological to the intensely personal.
Thanks Goodreads

The mother dance: How children change your life (1999) by Harriet Lerner

From the celebrated author of The Dance of Anger comes an extraordinary book about mothering and how it transforms us -- and all our relationships -- inside and out. Written from her dual perspective as a psychologist and a mother, Lerner brings us deeply personal tales that run the gamut from the hilarious to the heart-wrenching. From birth or adoption to the empty nest, The Mother Dance teaches the basic lessons of motherhood: that we are not in control of what happens to our children, that most of what we worry about doesn't happen, and that our children will love us with all our imperfections if we can do the same for them. Here is a gloriously witty and moving book about what it means to dance the mother dance.

Thanks to Goodreads!

Haunted ground (2003) by Erin Hart

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Haunted Ground (Nora Gavin #1)

A dazzling debut -- already an international publishing sensation -- combining forensics, history, archaeology, and suspense.
Introducing Erin Hart, who brings the beauty, poignancy, mystery, and romance of the Irish countryside to her richly nuanced first novel.

When farmers cutting turf in a peat bog make a grisly discovery -- the perfectly preserved severed head of a yo  

A dazzling debut -- already an international publishing sensation -- combining forensics, history, archaeology, and suspense.
Introducing Erin Hart, who brings the beauty, poignancy, mystery, and romance of the Irish countryside to her richly nuanced first novel.

When farmers cutting turf in a peat bog make a grisly discovery -- the perfectly preserved severed head of a young woman with long red hair -- Irish archaeologist Cormac Maguire and American pathologist Nora Gavin team up in a case that will open old wounds.

Peat bogs prevent decay, so the decapitated young woman could have been buried for two decades, two centuries, or even much longer. Who is she? When was she killed? The extraordinary find leads to even more disturbing puzzles. The red-haired girl is clearly a case for the archaeologists, not the police. Still, her tale may have shocking ties to the present, and Cormac and Nora must use cutting-edge techniques to preserve ancient evidence.

And the red-haired girl is not the only enigma in this remote corner of Galway. Two years earlier, Mina Osborne, the local landowner's Indian-born wife, went for a walk with her young son and never returned. Did Mina simply decide to disappear, or did mother and child become lost in the treacherous bog? Could they, too, be hidden in its depths, only to be discovered centuries from now? Or did the landowner, Hugh Osborne, murder his family, as some villagers suspect?

Bracklyn House, Osborne's stately home, holds many secrets for Nora and Cormac and policeman Garrett Devaney. But time is running out. Devaney's superiors want him off the Osborne case. Now. He wants to stay and find a killer.

Meticulously crafted and resonating with traditional music and folklore, Haunted Ground celebrates Ireland's turbulent history, revealing the eternal, subliminal connections between past and present in a riveting novel that heralds the arrival of a bright new crime-writing star.                  

 

Thanks to Goodreads!

The Marco Effeect (Q#5) (2014) by Jussi Adler-Olsen

A Danish banking scam whose tentacles extend to Cameroon spells trouble for Department Q’s Carl Mørck and a young boy who gets caught in the crossfire.
It’s true: The coverup is always worse than the original problem. If only William Stark hadn’t gotten suspicious about the ostensibly gibberish text message a Bantu development officer sent from Cameroon just before he vanished, René E. Eriksen, his boss at the Evaluation Department for Developmental Assistance, wouldn’t have had to send him off to Africa to investigate or assented to a shadowy banker's order to have him murdered on his return. And if only Marco Jameson, a teenage beggar hiding from his uncle Zola, who planned to have him maimed to increase his daily take, hadn’t taken refuge in Stark’s grave, Zola wouldn’t be sending his young corps fanning out all over Copenhagen to find the boy before he can lead the police to the body Zola buried himself. Now Marco is frantically on the run. Eriksen and his old schoolmate and co-conspirator, banker Teis Snap, are headed for a major falling-out. And Carl, who’d be perfectly happy investigating the houseboat fire that claimed the life of Minna Virklund, wouldn’t have been sucked into a series of coverup murders that threaten to go on forever. These are already tough times for Carl. His girlfriend, psychologist Mona Ibsen, heads off his marriage proposal by breaking up with him; Marcus Jacobsen, the generally supportive head of Copenhagen Homicide, has abruptly retired; and the new acting head, deputy commissioner Lars Bjørn, has saddled Carl with Gordon Taylor, a rookie still in law school, to ride herd on Department Q’s expenses, ruin Carl’s interrogations and report every minor infraction back to his patron. So all parties concerned can expect major drama.
If a scene works, Adler-Olsen never minds reprising it two or three times with minor variations. The result is a tale as big and sprawling as Carl’s first four cases (The Purity of Vengeance, 2013, etc.) but more diffuse, more like a TV miniseries than a feature film.

Thanks to Kirkus!