Buckle Up for a Wild Ride of Murder and Snort-Your-Coffee Humor with Karsten Dusse, MURDER MINDFULLY

The classics of darkly funny crime fiction are feeling a bit dated -- who reads Donald Westlake's caper mysteries now? Of course, there are a lot of murder clubs and sleuth clubs overlapping into public television, but a lot of the humor there comes from the slightly worn-out trope of elderly ladies snooping around (hello, Miss Marple) and younger ones tumbling into chaos.

So hurrah for German lawyer and TV writer Karsten Dusse, whose 2019 book Achtsam Morden arrived on the US market this year, thanks to translator Florian Duijsens and Soho Press. Even the title is a very funny tease: MURDER MINDFULLY.

Björn Diemel is a very harassed attorney. Working for a big firm where he's responsible for successful criminal defense of violent offenders and psychopaths (sociopaths? both??), he's clear-eyed about his career: "Even my wife occasionally found my work rather questionable. But explaining our legal system to other people wasn't my job. My job was to exploit that system using every trick in the book. I made my money doing good for bad people."

Even though he knows he's doing exactly the work he's supposed to, and excellently, Diemel gets stressed by all this. Now his wife's fed up, but giving him one last chance -- which he'll grab, because he's desperate to have time with the little daughter he adores (and who he rarely sees already, due to Work).  

Which puts him into sessions with a mindfulness expert, for the sake of all that. Because even when he can spend time with his daughter, his mind is racing for work issues.

Joschka Breitner is more than willing to teach Diemel to pull himself back together through intention, focus, true mindfulness. But you know that thing about unintended consequences? It probably applies. After his first lesson, which even eases the tension in his neck, Diemel is fully appreciative:

"It was to be several weeks, however, before I realized that what Breitner revealed next would become the mantra for my first murder."

After all, when you're responsible for a shady criminal who sees accidental murders along the way as your problem to solve -- and he's "not only a brutal pimp, but also a big drug and arms dealer" -- and Dragan Sergowicz starts interfering with all the commitments to mindfully parenting and being courteous to the menacing mother of your child -- well, what tools are at hand for resolving things? 

It turns out that mindfulness coaching can lead to some very effective solutions! Of course, they might not be legal. Or morally great. But if they work?

Half the fun of this European farce of almost 400 pages is realizing, just a second ahead of Diemel, how he's going to apply his latest mindfulness lesson. Clear the calendar for the weekend, for this very entertaining page turner.

BIG NEWS: MURDER MINDFULLY is a debut, but Soho Press has clearly been working hard at catching up -- and the translation of the next book in this Mindful Murder series,  MY INNER CHILD WANTS TO KILL, will release in August. By then, you may be ready to apply more of the lessons that you and Diemel are painstakingly learning!

 

New Taipei Night Market Crime Novel from Ed Lin, THE DEAD CAN'T MAKE A LIVING

 

If you are an American or a European, you may feel like "immigrants" is a fighting word where you live -- the kind of issue that lures people into strong positions and sometimes regrettable statements. Your region's not the only one struggling with issues of migration, migrant workers, and immigration, though.

Ed Lin's newest Taipei Night Market novel (I reviewed Incensed, 99 Ways to Die, and Death Doesn't Forget - click on those) releases from Soho Crime on April 7, but of course you can pre-order it if you like. And THE DEAD CAN'T MAKE A LIVING is so packed with humor, peril, and plot twists that you might as well line up a copy to get you through whatever crises you feel like you are just barely handling.

 It helps if you know what the night market is in Taiwan, but Lin is expert at pulling you into the action with deft strokes of explanation. During his first class session at the night college that Jing-nan recently signed up for, to improve his life options, he's ready with a self-intro: "I want to tell you about my daily life, what it's like at the Shilin Night Market, where I have a stand called Unknown Pleasures. Visitors from every continent around the world love our skewers."

 But his very nasty teacher would rather tell the class about all the crimes Jing-nan's been involved with, calling them "stunts" and saying Jing-nan is associated with figures from Taiwan's underworld.

 Well, that last part is true, but it's not something Jing-nan would talk about --  he does have family members who carry clout in the criminal world. With such a nasty teacher, he's glad to know others will back him up, even though there's always a price to pay for that kind of support, isn't there?

The crux of this crime novel begins to unfold just a few pages in, as a group of Filipino customers are taking up a lot of the seats when Jing-nan gets back to his food stand. His quick math indicates they've spent a lot of money on his food, and he's glad to encourage them.

"We're happy to have generous customers like you. Thank you all so much." I meant it sincerely. These weren't tourists from the Philippines. They were migrant workers, and some had been taking the government Mandarin classes. Maybe they were from the nearby food-processing plant. ... they streamed into the night market, which offered a lot of food and entertainment for relatively cheap. I put my hands together and bowed my head slightly to my customers, a universal sign of humility and appreciation for their business. 

For Jing-nan, that amounts to a commitment to see even these migrant workers treated well. So when one of them is clearly murdered, and another asks him for help finding out what happened, this chef and "adult student" agrees to look into the death.

Soon he's in too deep to back out, and even his uncle Big Eye can't stop bad things from happening to him. Ever the entrepreneur, he speculates on the value of adding a crime blog to his food blog:

My crime posts wouldn't be journalistic and dry. They would start on a visceral note: "Two hours in, blood from my loosened molar continued to drip down my throat. I asked for a drink of water to wash away the metallic taste, but my kidnapper refused. It was going to be a long night."

Will Jing-nan ever make it back to class? Actually, with his relatives interfering on his behalf, will his nasty teacher make it back?? And how will all of this affect his bottom line, his de facto marriage to Nancy, and his ability to staff his food stand?

Admit it. You have to know what happens next. I did ... I couldn't put this one down. 

When the Author Builds Herself a World: Nicola Griffith, SHE IS HERE

Last July I mentioned Nicola Griffith, whose lush noir crime fiction can be a slow-read delight. At that point, her Aud Torvingen trilogy, featuring a Norwegian-born detective, was just being reissued, and is now easy to grab for American readers: The Blue Place; Stay; and Always.

Griffith is better known for her award-winning world-building in science fiction/speculative fiction. But she teases that you may not have heard of her books (especially if you're not reading sci-fi), but you've heard of the authors who praise herhis sleuthing series: Dennis Lehane, Val McDermid, Dorothy Allison, Lee Child, Manda Scott, Francis Spufford, Laurie King, Ivy Pochoda, Robert Crais, Elizabeth Hand, James Sallis and more.

So when the independent PM Press focused on Griffith in its "Outspoken Authors" series this winter, I set everything else aside to read SHE IS HERE, a slim compendium of Griffith's nonfiction, poetry, and short stories. It's not the most polished work I've picked up, but it's definitely compelling. 

As an example, in a "letter" to Hild, who ran an early Anglo-Saxon (Early Medieval) abbey and is better known as St. Hilda (protagonist of the award-winning novel Hild, pictured above), Griffith tells this historical personage brought to life that "On some level, you made me."

Of all the women remembered by history -- even sketchily -- you're the onlyu one I know of who lived on her own terms. Your renown was not as anyone's parent or wife, or for suffering unspeakable torment or a martyr's death. All you achieved was a person ion your own right. You lived a long and successful life and died admired and powerful. You won.

You won. That single fact, that women can win, helped counterbalance all the nonsense I'd absorbed from history. Partly because I stood on those ruins and saw what you had made, I knew we could each triumph on our own terms and in our own service.

When you notice that Griffiths describes herself on her website as a "queer cripple with a PhD," her self-discovery through Hild rings even more powerfully. And as a fictional world-builder, she clearly walks in company with such powerful writers as Margaret Atwood and J.R.R. Tolkein.

Give yourself a treat, a stretch, a vivid entry into the mind of an outstanding author. Grab a copy of SHE IS HERE. When you've finished reading it, maybe give it to the local library, for all the folks who otherwise might not notice an invitation into this potent adventure. 

 

 

Two Memorable Crime Novels for Winter Reading: Con Lehane's THE RED SCARE and Cara Black's HUGUETTE (December Releases)

New York City in 1950 held neighborhoods far more separate than they are today: From Hell's Kitchen, where Mick Mulligan is starting his new chapter as a private investigator (PI), to the neighborhood where a black cab driver's family lives, means Mick's white Irish self steps into danger, threat, and abuse. But this isn't just his first case—it's his only case, dangled in front of him by organized labor leaders, which Mick's already aware means just a doorway away from organized crime. 

Besides, Mick can't work his own trade any longer, thanks to the anti-Communist rage sweeping the nation:

This was the reasoning—I went to meetings with Communists, I ate lunch with Communists, I agreed with Communists on certain things—that got me fired from my job as a cartoonist (we liked to call ourselves animators) at the Disney studio, won me a place on the Hollywood blacklist, and brought me back to New York City, where I hung out my shingle as a private investigator.

Mick's investigation and his own safety are tangled with union politics and high-powered maneuvering by men ready for serious power. He's not a serious "Red" himself, although he believes every working person should get a fair deal. But that's enough to paint a label on him, leading into what author Con Lehane calls THE RED SCARE MURDERS (release delayed to Dec. 16). 

And the label can swipe in all directions, as his taxi driver, an old friend of the man on death row that Mick's trying to exonerate, makes clear:

"You one of them fellas who go out and save the guy the cops thought done it? ... That's what Harold needs. Harold didn't kill no one. ... Maybe it was them Communists he got himself mixed up with."

Lehane's language is perfect for this page-turner crime novel, with phrases like "his tone as sincere as a priest in a pulpit," and plenty of Irish immigrant heritage tossed in.  One of Mick's helpful allies even mentions Hollywood detective fiction author Dashiell Hammett, in an effort to encourage the would-be PI: "I guess he told me this because Hammett had been Red-baited too."

Swing along for the smart and sometimes devious women, the men puzzling out the politics of the time, the darkness of urban angers and the gentle efforts of friendship. THE RED SCARE is a classic of the urban noir genre, with plenty of quick twists and not much gore. Besides, there are such strong parallels in the social politics of Lehane's 1950s and our own 2025 that you could imagine this feisty crime novel was just written last month. Great fun and good reading.

THE RED SCARE is one of the November releases from Soho Crime, an imprint of Soho Press, and definitely has a place on the winter to-be-read (TBR) stack, for both nostalgia and good feelings.

Another December release from Soho Crime, HUGUETTE by Cara Black (Dec. 2), might qualify for some "trigger warnings." Set in Paris at the end of World War II, it's jammed with rape, everyday sexual and physical abuse, and messy violent deaths of nice people. 

But for any reader of Black's excellent Aimée Leduc Paris PI series, this is a must-read. The first few chapters flip back and forth between 1947 and 1945, not always smoothly. About a third of the way into this 300-page historical police and crime novel, the name Leduc comes up, and Cara Black fans know we're on our way into a significant "back-story" to the popular series. How much trust can Huguette Faure place in the "flic" (cop) who offers to help her? Who murdered her father and stole the family business? What are the secrets behind the grown children who now surround her, and who don't know what was stolen -- or, more poignantly, WHO was stolen -- from this attractive, determined, and impoverished young woman who'd been given such a bad hand by history and crime as a pair?

"These cocky soldiers needed to be shown they couldn't treat her like a kid," Huguette thinks as she puts herself in fresh danger with more questions. "Establish authority, her father would say, when dealing with black marketers."

But Black's double epigraph to the book includes a quote from Benito Mussolini's foreign minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, and it's one Huguette should keep in mind: "Victory finds a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan."

If you can keep reading, with hope, through Huguette's grievous losses, Black's portrait of postwar Paris and her backstory to Aimée Leduc will be a gift to your mystery-loving soul. Buy two copies: one for a friend's holiday gift, and one to treat yourself to some willing Parisian distraction as you keep checking your lists. 

Three Kinds of Crime Fiction/Mystery, 3 Settings: Hamburg, Fiji, Maine

Catching up a bit ...

I picked up HAMBURG NOIR over the summer, as it had an August release date. Part of the top-notch and provocative Akashic Noir series, it's edited by Jan Karsten and mostly translated -- 11 out of the 14 stories -- by Noah Harley. The book's presented in three sections: Water & Schnapps, Dream & Reality, Power & Oblivion. The 10-page introduction is extraordinary in itself, an introduction to the German city from a lover's lips.

When I opened the book, I expected to taste something of the city where my father was born, in 1925, to parents "just Jewish enough" to need to leave their homeland. But that Hamburg is not in the book, and the reason's clear in looking at the author biographies: Most of the authors were born in the 1960s, long after war had changed their landscape. I was eager to read what Zoë Beck would contribute ("Abreast Schwartzonnensand"), as I'd read some of her other fiction. Hers turned out to be a courtroom scene shaped as a play, all dialogue, one of the most interesting works of crime fiction I've read. Other stories, more conventional in form, range from a handful of pages to a story of almost 30 pages by Matthias Wittekindt. And all of them, as expected, are dark, often twisted, even malicious.

I liked this passage from Katrin Seddig's tale, set in the Altona district:

I wasn't Miles Davis. The world wasn't a film noir, the world was gloomy and foolish, it had no beauty. That was the difficulty: to track down the beauty in it all. Wasn't that the essence? Everything always looked like something else to me—that, or I was left searching for it something that I already knew and hoped to find in what I was seeing.

If Hamburg is one of your love languages, pull this onto your bookshelf. If noir is how you wrestle with the world, ditto. And if you just want to play tourist -- well, this book will prevent you from going to Hamburg. So maybe take a pass, unless perhaps you're longing to feel better about New York by contrast.

Nilima Rao's second Fiji mystery featuring Sergeant Akal Singh came out in June. SHIPWRECK IN FIJI (Soho Crime), set in 1915, with the Great War echoing from the other side of the world, is indeed (as its press release claims) "brimming with warmth and humor." The Indian-born police officer is way out of his comfort zone, still struggling to grasp the culture in which he's been pinned. Chasing down possible Germans on a nearby island should seem familiar, but instead Akal lands in more confusion as he meets native villagers whose tribal customs may prevent pursuit of the criminals he's after. For the sake of his friend Taviti, ready to translate the local customs, Akal takes on a mentor's role in policing, and learns a great deal about the "true stories" that men tell each other. I couldn't put this one down. (And you don't need to have read the first in the series, A Disappearance in Fiji, but you'll probably want to catch up with it after Akal has you applauding his efforts.)

I didn't realize at first that Scott Carson was the pseudonym of Michael Koryta --  if I'd known, I might not have tried the new title under the Carson authorship, DEPARTURE 37, for fear it would be "too terrifying" for my taste. That would have been my loss! It's rare that an author can provide underpinnings to time travel as part of a crime novel or thriller and have it all make sense. This book, set in coastal northern Maine, takes 16-year-old Charlie through a naval experiment that tears open her life, starting with the moment when her deceased mother's voice speaks to her from the cockpit of a wrecked plane, saying what hundreds of pilots across the country are also hearing in the voices of people they love: Don't fly today. I refuse to offer any spoilers ... that should be enough to let you know whether this is your kind of good read. To my delight, it was one of my best treats of the season, and goes onto my "let's read this again" shelf, for sure, with its attachment to "the most famous moment in the history of artificial intelligence."

More reviews soon, as I'm now writing them for two other publications, just figuring out my footing. Or pagination.

 

Brief Mention: THE NAMING OF THE BIRDS by Paraic O'Donnell

I found Paraic O'Donnell's two earlier books, The Maker of Swans and The House on Vesper Sands, so compelling that I've shelved them in my "read again" section. Haunting and full of the unexpected, they situate at the intersection of literary fiction and crime fiction.

So I bought his third book this summer, THE NAMING OF THE BIRDS. This one's more squarely crime fiction, but evocative and often mysterious. If you're an Irish crime fiction fan, grab a copy. If you long for justice for children and especially the orphaned, you'll also want this. It's not about birds (or about Adam and Genesis) -- the title is a misnomer that way -- but oh, what a good read.

Scottish Noir, THE DIARY OF LIES by Philip Miller (3rd Shona Sandison Book)

Beach reading is wrapping up -- it's time for substantial and satisfying crime fiction to go with the hints of autumn rolling in. And the newest investigative reporter novel from Edinburgh's Philip Miller is perfect for the task.

THE DIARY OF LIES picks up with Shona Sandison, whose necessary walking cane (an injury sustained in The Golden Acre; more about it in The Hollow Tree) disguises her determination to get the scoop for her newspaper, no matter the risks. The promotional material for the book calls it a "paranoid political thriller." That would almost qualify it for nonfiction at this point, wouldn't it? Shona takes the situation seriously and angrily (a good definition of Shona herself), making it frustrating when her investigation takes her into what feels briefly like some adult-level fairy-tale crossover between Britain's "Green Man" and the mythic Robin Hood. Yet violence keeps erupting around her, and her narrow escapes are far from amusing. 

When a sketchy woman armed with a shotgun opts to let Shona past the gateway to a hidden Internet guru, she's still stunned from her sudden morning tumble into blood and threat. "Her path had been disarranged. Now, she barely knew her way forward." Plus, she's a city worker — how can she handle a situation that's taking her away from paved roads and GPS and all? Her abrupt passage comes with instructions from a rough woman leading her further off road:

"Over the stile and through the trees," the woman said. "Keep going straight ahead ... you'll come to a large house. The manor. The curtains will be drawn. You'll find Robin in there."

"Robin?"

"Loxley.  You'll be entering the back of the house. Wait at the curtained window — you'll hear the radio. Don't go in, love—he's armed. Wait to be let in."

Shona looked at the woman, calmly exhaling smoke. She was warning of deadly violence, yes she seemed serene.

"Okay. This way?" Shona pointed to the fence.

"I'm not repeating myself, sunshine."

What she discovers at the crumbling old mansion is a far cry from an upscale data farm, yet it offers access to the information she needs to make sense of the political corruption she's discovered. 

Shona looked at the data loading, the entwined wires, the blinking lights. This was not the journalism she'd grown up with, in which she had made her way. This was about systems, codes, data and access. Arcane technologies. ... She felt uneasy. Aware of how afraid she might be. 

It won't be easy to run, when the time comes. Not with her cane, and not without it. But bullets will soon fly.

One of the delights of this dark and well-twisted novel is the steady echo of Britain's older cultures beneath the action. There's no need to read the two preceding novels, but those who have will notice right away that the sense of ancient mythos and of a universe that's not automatically friendly is still throbbing in Miller's version of Edinburgh and its surroundings. 

Watch for the threads that tie Shona, however reluctantly, to her uncertain allies. If she's going to both survive the threats and provide a top-notch and substantiated journalistic exposé, she'll need every connection she can summon.

Soho Press describes this new release as a good fit for "for fans of Ian Rankin, John le Carré, and Denise Mina." I'd extend the list to work by Paul Doiron, Lee Child, Ruth Rendell, Jaqueline Winspear, and Charles Todd. If "political paranoia" is getting to you, racing against it with Shona Sandison may bring a sense of relief and capability, as well as the satisfaction of a soundly constructed and resonant crime novel.