This Night’s Foul Work, by Fred Vargas

This Night’s Foul Work is the fourth novel in the Adamsberg series translated into English. It is a playful, interesting and somewhat implausible crime books, but the writing is so great the implausible part doesn’t really matter much.
Two drug dealers have had their throats cut in the Paris flea market. Normally this would [...]

Death at La Fenice, by Donna Leon

La Fenice is the name of the famed opera house in Venice. The novel starts with the death of the well-known German conductor Helmut Wellauer. He is found dead in his dressing room after an intermission, shortly before he was to conduct La Traviata. Of course, the police are called.
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The Appeal, by John Grisham

From The Appeal, Chapter 1: “The courtroom was in a state of high alert, as if bombs were coming and the sirens were wailing. Dozens of people milled about, or looked for seats, or chatted nervously with their eyes darting around. When Jared Kurtin and the defense army entered [...]

Fourth book by Stieg Larsson will not be published

The Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet today published an article that stated that the manuscript for Stieg Larsson’s fourth and unfinished book will neither be completed nor finished.
The family confirms that there exist a draft for a fourth book. Approximately 200 pages have been written. However, Stieg Larsson’s familily strongly feels that it would be inappropriate to [...]

The Return: An Inspector Van Veeteren Mystery, by Hakan Nesser

Hakan (Håkan) Nesser is another of the brilliant Swede crime writers who have been translated into English recently. He is a skilled writer, with well developed plots in his books, and has written a series of books about Inspector Van Veeteren. As you will see when you read The Return, Van Veeteren is a likable, [...]

The Crime genre - what is hot in crime books?

I suspect this is a great question with a multitude of possible answers. Like beauty, hot-ness most likely resides in the eye of the beholder. Even when the topic is crime books.
Regardless of the pitfalls involved in raising and attempting to answer this question, Maxim Jakubowski of Guardian attempted to do this a few years [...]

The Ice Princess, by Camilla Lackberg

(Forthcoming, April 2008 - review based on the Swedish edition.) Camilla Lackberg (Läckberg in Swedish) is a young (born 1974), very talented writer. She was voted Swedish Writer of the Year for 2005. Her books have so far sold 1.5 million copies. She is another of the many talented Swedish crime writers.
The Ice Princess takes [...]

The Redbreast, by Jo Nesbo

The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo won the Glass Key prize for the best Nordic crime novel when it was first published, and was subsequently voted Norway’s best crime novel. Jo Nesbo ( Nesbø in Norwegian) is a young, wonderfully gifted storyteller that increasingly is being noticed among crime book readers in the US and UK. [...]

John Grisham and The Appeal

John Grisham is a writer I enjoy and like. Both as a person and as a writer. He is, as far as I can tell, a straight-talking, socially conscious, and likeable guy. John Grisham puts his money where his mouth is, both in politics and in charitable, philanthropic and other matters.
He was recently interviewed in [...]

Stieg Larsson - Film and Hype

Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (The Girl With The Dragoon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and the title of the third volume still to be decided for the English translation) is hot stuff. The sales figures to date are stunning (from Shotsmag):
2.1 million copies sold in Sweden* (the paperback of Volume III is not [...]

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