Tuesday, August 30, 2016
Saturday, August 13, 2016
Into oblivion () by Arnaldur Indridason
Loyal readers of Arnaldur Indridason's Erlendur series will be thrilled by Into Oblivion, the mesmerizing follow-up to the gritty prequel Reykjavik Nights. Here devoted fans will get another glimpse of Erlendur in his early days as a young, budding detective, while also absorbing plenty about Iceland and what makes the place tick.
It’s 1979. A woman swims in a remote, milky-blue lagoon. Steam rises from the water and as it clears, a body is revealed in the ghostly light. Miles away, a vast aircraft hangar rises behind the perimeter fence of the US military base. A sickening thud is heard as a man’s body falls from a high platform.
Many years before, a schoolgirl went missing, and the world has forgotten her. But Erlendur has not. Erlendur is a newly promoted detective, and he is contending with a battered dead body, a rogue CIA operative, and America’s troublesome presence in Iceland. In his spare time he investigates a cold case. He is only starting out, but he is already deeply involved in his work.
The writer whose work The New York Times describes as "having the sweep and consequence of epic storytelling," has outdone himself in this multi-layered and masterful novel of suspense.
Thanks to MacMillan Books for synopsis.
Many years before, a schoolgirl went missing, and the world has forgotten her. But Erlendur has not. Erlendur is a newly promoted detective, and he is contending with a battered dead body, a rogue CIA operative, and America’s troublesome presence in Iceland. In his spare time he investigates a cold case. He is only starting out, but he is already deeply involved in his work.
The writer whose work The New York Times describes as "having the sweep and consequence of epic storytelling," has outdone himself in this multi-layered and masterful novel of suspense.
Thanks to MacMillan Books for synopsis.
The man from Beijing (2010) by Henning Mankell
Thanks for comprehensive review from Mike Peed of The New Yorker
Published: February 26, 2010
Henning Mankell is perhaps the second-most-famous modern Swedish cultural figure, after Ingmar Bergman — which seems appropriate since he’s married to one of Bergman’s daughters. And since portions of Sweden remain winterbound for more than seven months a year, it seems equally appropriate that much of these countrymen’s work is enshrouded in gloom. Bergman wrote of a “virulent, terrifying evil” within us all. Mankell asks, “Why does barbarism always wear a human face?” If striations of optimism can be found in their work, maybe that’s just the Northern Lights.
Mankell is best known for a series of police procedurals involving Detective Kurt Wallander, a saturnine lump of a man who consistently beats the odds to solve Sweden’s most brutal crimes. (Mankell concluded the series last year, but the final book has yet to be translated into English.) He has also written more than two dozen plays, a few children’s books and several stand-alone novels. As a young man, Mankell began to live part time in Mozambique. “I’ve understood more about the world,” he likes to say, “by living with one foot in the snow and one foot in the dust.”
Mankell’s latest crime novel, “The Man From Beijing,” opens with the discovery of 19 dead and disfigured bodies in the fictional town of Hesjovallen: “It was as if a blood-laden hurricane had stormed through the village.” The local police uncover exactly two clues: The victims appear to be distantly related, and someone dropped a red ribbon in the adjoining woods.
Fortunately, Birgitta Roslin, an inquisitive judge, has some time on her hands: on doctor’s orders (after a diagnosis of anxiety-induced fatigue) she can’t go to work for a fortnight. Hesjovallen is her mother’s hometown, and a little digging among old papers and on the Internet reveals that she is connected to the victims. So she promptly braves the bad roads to Hesjovallen, books a room at a hotel and, before long, has the whole crime worked out. If only the police would listen.
There’s a hard-boiled gruffness to Mankell’s prose, although his story often reads like the product of an oral tradition, dotted with aphorisms. (“White men smelling of spirits were always more unpredictable than sober ones.”) Most grating, however, is Laurie Thompson’s translation, full of awkward syntax and clichés. (To what degree this originates with Mankell is hard to know.) One character is “not yet defeated, once and for all,” while another “should have understood, but refused to accept what she really did understand.” “Ignorance is bliss”; “The devil is always in the details”; and “If you want to make an omelet, you have to break an egg.”
If a Raymond Chandler effect is the goal, the humdrum plot interferes. As is the case with so many of Mankell’s novels, the primary concern of “The Man From Beijing” isn’t to solve the crime (early on, Birgitta understands its genesis as “probably no more than the usual: revenge, greed, jealousy”) but to polemicize — against the wholesale debasement of Swedish society but also, jarringly, against China’s recent chicanery in Africa, where the energy-hungry nation is exploiting a trove of natural resources.
The route is circuitous and often redundant. From Birgitta in the present day, readers are flung back to the mid-19th century, first to Guangzhou and then to Nevada, before returning to 21st-century Beijing and, finally, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Several characters exist primarily to deliver political and social précis, arguing repeatedly that while China can be an insidious country, we Westerners are hardly innocent of exploiting other nations. The intrigue surrounding the murders dissipates. Detectives fade to distant bystanders. And the origin of the red ribbon — the key with which Birgitta unlocks the mystery — goes unexplained. Mankell’s fierce instinct for social criticism is admirable. If only it didn’t sabotage the opportunity for old-fashioned whodunit delight.
Mankell is best known for a series of police procedurals involving Detective Kurt Wallander, a saturnine lump of a man who consistently beats the odds to solve Sweden’s most brutal crimes. (Mankell concluded the series last year, but the final book has yet to be translated into English.) He has also written more than two dozen plays, a few children’s books and several stand-alone novels. As a young man, Mankell began to live part time in Mozambique. “I’ve understood more about the world,” he likes to say, “by living with one foot in the snow and one foot in the dust.”
Mankell’s latest crime novel, “The Man From Beijing,” opens with the discovery of 19 dead and disfigured bodies in the fictional town of Hesjovallen: “It was as if a blood-laden hurricane had stormed through the village.” The local police uncover exactly two clues: The victims appear to be distantly related, and someone dropped a red ribbon in the adjoining woods.
Fortunately, Birgitta Roslin, an inquisitive judge, has some time on her hands: on doctor’s orders (after a diagnosis of anxiety-induced fatigue) she can’t go to work for a fortnight. Hesjovallen is her mother’s hometown, and a little digging among old papers and on the Internet reveals that she is connected to the victims. So she promptly braves the bad roads to Hesjovallen, books a room at a hotel and, before long, has the whole crime worked out. If only the police would listen.
There’s a hard-boiled gruffness to Mankell’s prose, although his story often reads like the product of an oral tradition, dotted with aphorisms. (“White men smelling of spirits were always more unpredictable than sober ones.”) Most grating, however, is Laurie Thompson’s translation, full of awkward syntax and clichés. (To what degree this originates with Mankell is hard to know.) One character is “not yet defeated, once and for all,” while another “should have understood, but refused to accept what she really did understand.” “Ignorance is bliss”; “The devil is always in the details”; and “If you want to make an omelet, you have to break an egg.”
If a Raymond Chandler effect is the goal, the humdrum plot interferes. As is the case with so many of Mankell’s novels, the primary concern of “The Man From Beijing” isn’t to solve the crime (early on, Birgitta understands its genesis as “probably no more than the usual: revenge, greed, jealousy”) but to polemicize — against the wholesale debasement of Swedish society but also, jarringly, against China’s recent chicanery in Africa, where the energy-hungry nation is exploiting a trove of natural resources.
The route is circuitous and often redundant. From Birgitta in the present day, readers are flung back to the mid-19th century, first to Guangzhou and then to Nevada, before returning to 21st-century Beijing and, finally, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Several characters exist primarily to deliver political and social précis, arguing repeatedly that while China can be an insidious country, we Westerners are hardly innocent of exploiting other nations. The intrigue surrounding the murders dissipates. Detectives fade to distant bystanders. And the origin of the red ribbon — the key with which Birgitta unlocks the mystery — goes unexplained. Mankell’s fierce instinct for social criticism is admirable. If only it didn’t sabotage the opportunity for old-fashioned whodunit delight.
Monday, August 8, 2016
The golden calf: Inspector Huss #5 (2013) by Helene Tursten
Thanks to Goodreads for synopsis
Soho’s perennially popular Swedish crime series featuring Detective Inspector Irene Huss—jiujitsu champion, mother of teenage twin girls, and investigator on Göteborg Murder Squad—is back!
Three men have been shot in one of Göteborg's most fashionable neighborhoods, sending Irene Huss and her colleagues on a goose chase through a tony world of expensive cars and fancy homes. All three victims seem to be tied to one person, the glamorous dot-com darling Sanna Kaegler-Ceder, but Sanna isn’t talking, even when her own life seems to be at stake.
Three men have been shot in one of Göteborg's most fashionable neighborhoods, sending Irene Huss and her colleagues on a goose chase through a tony world of expensive cars and fancy homes. All three victims seem to be tied to one person, the glamorous dot-com darling Sanna Kaegler-Ceder, but Sanna isn’t talking, even when her own life seems to be at stake.
Sunday, July 31, 2016
Widow (2016) by Fiona Barton
The story focuses on Jean, a quiet hairdresser who was wooed by charismatic banker Glen Taylor. Barton deftly shows the small rifts in their relationship—such as his tendency to order food for Jean, who is too afraid of offending him to tell him when she doesn’t like something. Jean is desperate for a baby, but after trouble conceiving, Glen refuses to consider “unnatural” in vitro or the prying into their personal lives that adoption would entail. When he stops working in the bank in favor of driving a delivery truck, Jean believes his reasons for the career change: His boss didn’t like him because he was ambitious; he wants to start his own business. When Glen gets a computer that he doesn’t let Jean interact with, she refers to her husband’s new habit as “his nonsense” and grudgingly accepts his increasingly withdrawn state.
By giving us glimpses of Jean’s submission, Barton conceals the truth about how much Glen’s wife really knows about him. Their relationship is publicly questioned once he becomes the prime suspect in the disappearance of Bella, a little girl plucked out of her backyard while her single mother was inside. Is Jean willfully ignorant? An accomplice? A victim herself? Those are the questions that the book’s two other narrators, reporter Kate Waters and detective Bob Sparkes, want answered after Glen dies in a car accident.
Barton is a former reporter for the British tabloid the Daily Mail, and her past experience shows in her matter-of-fact prose. Given the subject matter, the book could easily feel exploitative or overly sensationalist, but Barton leaves any graphic details to the reader’s imagination. She can be a bit too dry at times, with a section on the police’s investigation through chat rooms frequented by pedophiles coming off a bit like an essay on how to catch an internet predator. Likewise, in her desire not to delve too deep into the procedural, Glen’s trial feels a bit like only glimpsing the JonBenét Ramsey case from the periphery.
But her tight writing works well when she just shows a glimpse of what’s going on in Jean’s head and then moves on, keeping the deeper question of “what does she know?” a mystery. There are moments when Jean rebels against her passive life in little ways, like plucking an apple from the counter of the posh hotel her media handlers have taken her to and then walking out on them. Other times it’s clear her relationship with Glen has left her deeply emotionally scarred, clinging to the image she had of herself when they were still a young couple full of potential. Particularly compelling is Jean’s resentment of Bella’s mother, who she blames for making the girl so easy to snatch.
Waters is a particularly compelling supporting character, a predator in her pursuit of exclusive interviews with both Bella’s mother and Jean—working to build trust with both vulnerable women in their moments of crisis. Yet Barton also makes her deeply sympathetic in intimate moments that seem drawn from the author’s own life, like a conversation about her career with her husband or the chaste flirtation she shares with Sparkes.
Lacking the personal experience that helps her quickly develop Waters or the page count devoted to Jean, Barton’s portrayal of Sparkes feels shallow by comparison. He’s relegated to an old cop archetype—devoted to catching his man even if it puts him at odds with his superiors and his wife. But his dedicated police work helps the narrative slowly unfold in a way that feels more methodically earned than the big twist that drives Gone Girl. Evidence slides into place, but nothing fundamentally shifts the paradigm in a way that will jar the reader. That might not make television audiences gasp in the same way, but there’s still plenty of suspense that promises to make The Widow as effective for binge watching as it is as a page-turner.
Thanks to AC Club for excellent review.
A faceless killer (2009) by Hening Mankell
Thanks to Goodreads for their review
One frozen January morning at 5am, Inspector Wallander responds to what he believes is a routine call-out. When he reaches the isolated farmhouse he discovers a bloodbath. An old man has been tortured and beaten to death, his wife lies barely alive beside his shattered body, both victims of a violence beyond reason. The woman supplies Wallander with his only clue: the perpetrators may have been foreign. When this is leaked to the press, it unleashes racial hatred.
Kurt Wallander's life is a shambles: his wife has left him, his daughter refuses to speak to him, and even his ageing father barely tolerates him. He works tirelessly, eats badly, and drinks his nights away in a lonely, neglected flat. But now, with winter tightening and his activities being monitored by a tough-minded district attorney, Wallander must forget his troubles and throw himself into a battle against time and against mounting racial hatred.
One frozen January morning at 5am, Inspector Wallander responds to what he believes is a routine call-out. When he reaches the isolated farmhouse he discovers a bloodbath. An old man has been tortured and beaten to death, his wife lies barely alive beside his shattered body, both victims of a violence beyond reason. The woman supplies Wallander with his only clue: the perpetrators may have been foreign. When this is leaked to the press, it unleashes racial hatred.Kurt Wallander's life is a shambles: his wife has left him, his daughter refuses to speak to him, and even his ageing father barely tolerates him. He works tirelessly, eats badly, and drinks his nights away in a lonely, neglected flat. But now, with winter tightening and his activities being monitored by a tough-minded district attorney, Wallander must forget his troubles and throw himself into a battle against time and against mounting racial hatred.
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