Swedish Noir: Second John Adderley Thriller #2 from Peter Mohlin and Peter Nyström

 [Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“It all comes together in a grimly satisfying series of events, showing more clearly than ever that Mohlin and Nyström understand costs and penalties. The finale of the book sets John reeling with the consequences he’s set in motion.”

 

This second novel by the Swedish friends and co-writers Mohlin and Nyström more than lives up to their 2021 debut in The Bucket List. Like the first novel, The Other Sister is told in alternating chapters, this time by a murder victim’s sister and by former FBI agent John Adderley. The harsh crescendo of revelation adds both suspense and depth to a very dark tale of bad choices leading to crime and consequences.

 

John Adderley, who previously gave up the security of American “witness protection” in order to return to Sweden to try to salvage his half-brother’s life, isn’t doing well in a Swedish County Criminal Investigation Division—his boss lacks management skills, making it tough for John to investigate at his best. Protecting his family members added stress to his police connections in the earlier book. Now things get much worse: The other man who’d tackled undercover work with him, Trevor, is in Sweden to beg John to extend a different kind of protection, a video that insures John’s safety from the Nigerian drug cartel he and Trevor infiltrated back in Baltimore. John’s rightfully hesitant—is Trevor actually working (unwillingly) for the cartel?

 

Meanwhile, the crime John’s supposed to be investigating on behalf of the Swedish team is much more complicated than it first looks. The reader learns the secrets and twists of this through the eyes of Alicia, sister to murder victim Stella—the sisters own a high-tech online dating site, with Alicia leading the computer underlayer, and Stella being the public face. In fact, Alicia’s face is exactly the problem: She’s scarred, horribly, and nobody would buy a product linked with her appearance. Alicia’s also abusing alcohol at a shattering level of danger.

 

Alicia is the one with the worst secrets. The narrative style means readers absorb the horrors of her life, while John is still struggling to survive the international crime syndicate that’s located him. That barrier of knowledge morphs The Other Sister into a high-stakes thriller, as Alicia’s drunken manipulations and John’s half-blinded efforts tear into each other.

 

John is, of course, the ultimate focus, and Mohlin and Nyström (with deft translation by Ian Giles) grant him clarity to see that “Everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong—and now he was trudging around in the trees without knowing which way was up.” While Alicia’s awful choices come from both alcohol and simmering rage, John’s add up to violating the loyalty he owes to both the law and his team.

 

“After the shooting at Bergvik, John simply had to recognize that the law—in the strictly legal sense—was no longer his guiding principle. Instead, he was deploying his own homemade moral philosophy, which seemed to take it for granted that most things were allowed if you were trying to secure your own liberty and survival. He comforted himself with the fact that this was probably the rule most people adhered to when their own existence was at stake.”

 

This cuts him off from his best allies, a lousy position. There will be no happy endings. Yet it all comes together in a grimly satisfying series of events, showing more clearly than ever that Mohlin and Nyström understand costs and penalties. The finale of the book sets John reeling with the consequences he’s set in motion.

 

It looks like there will be a third John Adderley thriller. John may survive, through his pragmatic deceptions. But where and how will he hide next?

 

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

Disappeared or Dead? THE DEATHWATCH BEETLE (Ann Lindell 9) from Kjell Erickson

 [Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“As more violence enters her tense investigation, and the inner madness of others takes on outer forms, how will Ann choose her own life themes? Does she need to remain lost, to stand aside from love?”

The Deathwatch Beetle is the ninth in Kjell Erickson’s Ann Lindell crime novels, and Lindell has actually left her job as a police inspector. But because she receives a tip that presumed-dead victim Cecilia Karlsson’s been seen alive, four years after the woman’s disappearance from the Swedish island of Gräsö, Ann steps back into investigating the cold case. Her motives are more mixed than that—she’s at a stage when she needs to sort out some things about herself—and maybe that’s a good way to walk among the personalities of this baffling set of crimes, open to emerging secrets and sorrow. And, incidentally, love.

Local consensus on the island is that Cecilia’s friend Casper died in the water, and Cecilia followed suit. When Ann decides to probe Cecilia’s death, she begins with a visit to the young woman’s parents—who are sure Cissi will come back some day—and then visits the men who’d once formed a circle of attention around Cecilia. When she starts with the area’s gossip, Robert, he tells her, “She’s dead. She took Casper’s death hard, unexpectedly hard, and followed him into the water. That’s the way you die here, if you choose to go voluntarily.”

But if she’s dead, why do the questions she left behind keep coming back to life? Ann identifies with disappearing—she did it herself, once—and the strand of her own life that keeps an unexpected life is the former investigator in her. She needs to solve Cecilia’s situation, in hopes of figuring out her own. “She could become a parish constable, move in with Edvard and live the rest of her life on the island. Daydreams, she understood that. The reality looked different.”

This is an elegantly written crime novel, with a sultry pace, translated as if it were high poetry, by Paul Norlen. Insects appear, mate, are eaten or vanish; the ticking of a deathwatch beetle invades the night in a half-hidden cabin; spiders and butterflies take center meaning in scenes. Slow layer by layer, with many shifts of viewpoint, the real story of Cecilia is laid bare—and it’s sordid and chilled.

Ann identified with this missing woman at the start of The Deathwatch Beetle. As more violence enters her tense investigation, and the inner madness of others takes on outer forms, how will Ann choose her own life themes? Does she need to remain lost, to stand aside from love?

Although The Deathwatch Beetle is far less gory than its characters’ souls seem to be, it frames a northern desperation that will feel familiar to readers of both Henning Mankell and Karin Fossum. The book can’t be rushed through; it demands attentive, focused reading.

Eriksson’s moody island of revelation is memorable, and as he did in his earlier award-winning novel, The Princess of Burundi, he paints murder here in layers that correspond to the shells and diversions of the soul. Perhaps we all long to be lost sometimes; will we agree, however, to be found?

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

Elderly and Wicked! Darkly Funny Murder from Helene Tursten in AN ELDERLY LADY MUST NOT BE CROSSED

 

[Originally published in New York Journal of Books]

“If you’re looking for distinctive international bouquet in your “Scandi noir,” this isn’t going to fit your shelf. Instead, it will be a dandy holiday gift, pocket size, darkly light-hearted, and a quick and easy introduction to the tongue-in-cheek side of one of today’s leading Swedish crime novelists.”

HeleneTursten summons her two established Swedish sleuths from two different series, Irene Huss and Embla Nyström, to tackle the wicked machinations of 88-year-old Maud in An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed, a holiday treat that will make a great stocking stuffer. Maud’s debut appearance in 2018’s An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good demonstrated that a stack of cleverly twisted short stories can comprise a delightful book. Tursten’s choice to pit her two detectives against this frankly wicked old lady adds to the dark humor of her newest tales.

For Maud, the pressure applied by the two police investigators as a team is the last straw: She’s successfully gotten away with murder in her own home, but it’s taken quite a lot of scheming and arranging, and she’d like a break. Why not treat herself to a luxury trip to South Africa, be wined and dined, see amazing wildlife, all while disguising her cleverness under the deceptive appearance of aging into confusion? People do so much work for you if you appear to be frail and needy, don’t they?

After the first tale, “An Elderly Lady Begins to Remember Her Past,” these dryly funny and dark stories form a mostly chronological sequence—starting with Maud as a child, caretaker of an 11-years-older sister with increasingly odd habits. Not that Maud herself is particularly normal! As she reflects during her flight to Africa, “Memories rise to the surface. That’s what happens when you get older.” We find the grim smiles of “little Maud” executing a trap for bullies; we also find her smiling as she rehearses her father’s fishing methods while making sure a competitive colleague will have a terrible accident.

“No point in brooding over the past,” Maud reassures herself. “Sometimes a person had to do certain things in order to survive the hard life of a single woman with a heavy responsibility to bear.”

In delightfully creepy steps, Maud develops her murderous personality through this set of six revelatory narratives. And if the ending is perhaps a little more sweet than an aging Maud has led us to anticipate, don’t neglect the pair of cookie recipes at the end of An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed. Innocent and sweet as they appear, one of them has been a murder weapon in Maud’s hands. But only, of course, because she was forced to use it!

Marlaine Delargy’s translation never gets in the way of the action in Tursten’s stories. On the other hand, it has little Swedish flavor to it, so if you’re looking for distinctive international bouquet in your “Scandi noir,” this isn’t going to fit your shelf. Instead, it will be a dandy holiday gift, pocket size, darkly light-hearted, and a quick and easy introduction to the tongue-in-cheek side of one of today’s leading Swedish crime novelists.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Excellent Swedish Crime Fiction: WE KNOW YOU REMEMBER from Tove Alsterdal

 

[Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“Among today’s abundant crime novels, it’s rare to find one that demands a second reading for its language and insight. We Know You Remember is one of that small group.”

Even before investigators suspect that he’s a victim, not a perpetrator, Olof Hagström’s presence in his long-ago home town in rural Sweden is drenched in sorrow, terror, and accusations. Living on the fringes of society, supporting himself through an off-the-books job and isolated by both his slow speech and his burdensome past, he yields to an impulse to visit his childhood home—where he finds his father dead in the bathtub.

Police detective Eira Sjödin hasn’t been around town much either, but the case calls her into a community that hasn’t forgiven or forgotten Olof. At age 14, he’d been the local scapegoat: convicted of rape and murder of another teen. His own mother wanted nothing more to do with him.

But Eira is going through her own changes of identity, as the investigator who’d mentored her enters retirement. A woman on a police force, including in Sweden, needs to watch her back as often among her colleagues as on the street. Suggestions from her mentor send her back to the case 20 years earlier where Olof was charged. “GG hasn’t exactly been explicit about what he wanted her to do, but his hints were more than enough. An unwillingness to listen. A suspicion that she was digging into Olof Hagström’s past because she felt guilty.”

Eira’d been only 9 years old when Olof was charged. Why should she feel guilty now? It has something to do with how she’d first seen the man in the interrogation room, sweating and frightened and incompetent. “It wasn’t just unease, it was stronger than that. It was disgust and contempt and a kind of curiosity that made her stray beyond the strictly professional.”

But opening up Olof’s past means reopening her own, and Eira’s family life growing up was far from simple. Those teen rebellion years included risks and secrets. If her investigation moves suspicion onto people she cares about, will the cost be too high? And what about her own mother, sliding into dementia—when she asks her mother to open up about the past, it’s only Eira’s anger at the old silence that keeps her pushing. “Whether you do or don’t remember, she thought, there’s something you’re trying to protect me from.”

The pipeline for translation of Scandinavian noir demands time. Tove Alsterdal’s 2009 debut in Sweden won her immediate acclaim, and she’s brought out more stand-alone novels.   We Know You Remember came out last year in Sweden, under a title that translates as “Uprooted.” This translation by Alice Menzies reads well, letting Alsterdal’s steady accumulation of haunting and guilt-drenched detail build a memorable internal world. The power of this crime novel is as much in the struggles of Eira’s too-personal investigation as it is in the criminal threats involved. Eira is a victim of her own inescapable compassion, as well as of the demands for clarity that comes with her investigation.

Among today’s abundant crime novels, it’s rare to find one that demands a second reading for its language and insight. We Know You Remember is one of that small group, and more American appearances of Tove Alsterdal’s other titles are well worth looking forward to.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

Outstanding Swedish Crime Novel from Peter Mohlin and Peter Nyström (Overlook Press)

 

[Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“Layered and lethal … The only thing better than the pleasure of this suspenseful and tightly plotted “Scandi noir” investigation is knowing there’s a sequel on the way.”

FBI fan? Witness protection reader? Scandinavian noir collector? The Bucket List, first in a new Swedish series of “Agent John Adderley” crime fiction, satisfies all these enthusiasms at once, in a stunning debut that’s layered and lethal.

Authors Mohlin and Nyström bring both journalism and screenwriting skills to this intense and unusually long first effort. FBI agent John Adderley, wrapping up an undercover stint to break up an international drug ring, knows he’ll never go back to his old life afterward, and that’s fine. Until, that is, he gets a packet from his long-estranged and dying mother in Sweden, calling him to investigate a cold-case murder being blamed on his half brother, whom he hasn’t seen since he was 12. Deliberately breaking the witness protection rules after the trial’s over, he head to his home town of Karlstad to dig for the truth, no matter the cost.

At first, chapters alternate with the earlier time of disappearance of Emilie Bjurwall, college-age heiress to a clothing empire, as seen through her father Heimar’s eyes. If Emilie is a rebel, her dad is a defeated misfit, resigned to being the eye-candy husband of his powerful wife, whose family owns the company. He’s the complete opposite of John Adderley, whose ability to plan and instant commitment to action should mean a great record in crime-solving—but backfire as he misleads his own team.

Then the action increases in pace, and drives directly through until the unexpected and impressive finale, based on John’s own deadly choice:

“John felt his palms go clammy, as Ruben continued. ‘I’ve not spoken to the boss yet. I wanted to find out what the situation was myself—see whether you were going to make contact with your brother and leak details of the investigation. But so far, all you seem to have done is drive by the house—so I’m willing to give you a chance to tell Primer yourself. He doesn’t have to know about our conversation here. With a little luck, he won’t throw you off the case. But it might also end in immediate dismissal and an internal investigation for gross professional misconduct.’

‘I realize this is going to have professional consequences,’ said John. ‘But the most important thing is that my true identity doesn’t get out. You have to understand that there are people out there who want nothing more than to see me dead.’ …

His colleague started the engine—a clear sign the conversation was over.

‘I’ll give you until the end of the week,’ he said. ‘If you haven’t told Primer who you are by then, I will.’”

Boosted by smooth and deft translation by Ian Giles, The Bucket List—the title refers to a mysterious tattoo on the arm of the missing-presumed-murdered heiress—weaves in lively side episodes of passion and pretense. Adderley’s unethical mother and brother make everything tougher. And whether the international syndicate will catch up with him before the crime’s actually solved means the pressure of that ticking clock never lets up.

The book’s already taken a debut novel award in Sweden (“Crimetime Award”) and merits more. The only thing better than the pleasure of this suspenseful and tightly plotted “Scandi noir” investigation is knowing there’s a sequel on the way.

Swedish Noir Trilogy Concludes, SLOWLY WE DIE from Emelie Schepp

Special prosecutor Jana Berzelius tackles a traumatically gruesome set of serial killings in this third and final book in this noted Swedish crime fiction trilogy from Emelie Schepp. SLOWLY WE DIE pits Berzelius against what looks like a group of revenge murders. But who's doing them, and why? At first, all Berzelius knows is that the victims are people who usually get thanked, not murdered: they're first responders and other medically trained experts.

But then again, considering the murder weapon is a skillfully used scalpel, the murderer may also belong inside that world where life and death are negotiated daily.

The two earlier books in this series are Marked for Life  and Marked for Revenge. Although I read a lot of noir, this series gave me chills at a level that I didn't choose to put into detail in reviews, because of the underlying crime of child sexual abuse, graphically shown in the other two books, that drives Berzelius in her work. So yes, you'll get more of the haunting horror that Berzelius faces in this third book if you read the other two first.

Then again -- the situation this time is so terrifying ... Berzelius winds up sharing her home with a terrifying person from her past, who's blackmailing her into letting him stay:

When she'd left the apartment, Danilo had been standing in the hall, looking at her. His arms had been crossed and something resembling a sneer had been on his lips. But he hadn't said anything, and she hadn't, either. She had simply met his gaze and fantasized about putting her hands around his neck and squeezing until he was gasping for breath.

She would gladly break every bone in his body and would more than gladly erase him from the face of the earth. But killing him was not an option -- not yet.

Right, maybe you don't need to take it any darker than this third book already presents. And it gets more frightening -- although the finely tuned and paced writing may well drag you though this book at a very high speed. (It did, for me.)

Blurbs for the book, because it's "Scandinavian noir," compare it to Jo Nesbø's writing. But I'd pick Karin Fossum as the most comparable. Prepare to shudder.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Heads Up: Emelie Schepp, MARKED FOR REVENGE, and Bill Pronzini, THE VIOLATED

I won't be posting full reviews of these two books coming out in the next week or so, but want to mention them -- and the reasons for my choices.

Emelie Schepp lives in Sweden, and her "Marked" trilogy is being adeptly translated -- the second book, MARKED FOR REVENGE, was moved into English seamlessly by Suzanne Martin Cheadle (it's hard to even tell it was translated). It's suspense, with high stakes; the protagonist, prosecutor Jana Berzelius, is investigating the international drug trade and child trafficking in Sweden.

My problem with it is really my own ... I find graphic child abuse really hard to read. I read all of the first book in this series, Marked for Life, and couldn't bear to reframe it as a review. As soon as I started reading the second book, MARKED FOR REVENGE (release date February 28), all the emotions from the first book rolled back at me. I've skimmed book 2, and it's brilliantly plotted and tightly written. But again, the level of abuse and violence is so far outside my comfort zone (which is pretty wide really ... I have read and enjoyed most of Andrew Vachss and Carol O'Connell, for example, as well as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series) that I'm not going to spell it all out. If you're into it, you can see reviews elsewhere. Sorry.

For a very different reason, I'm not going to present THE VIOLATED, the March 7 release from Grand Master of Mystery Bill Pronzini. This one's an audacious attempt at narrating the investigation of a serial rapist's career and murder from multiple points of view. I thought the technique took the book into being very flat, and the tension never rose the way a good work of suspense should. Not did the character acquire enough depth. Even the California setting didn't quite come to life. I can't recommend it -- but that said, Pronzini is generally marvelous, and if you haven't yet read any of his books, do try some of the others. I'll be watching for his next book, figuring that he too knows this one didn't work out as well as he'd hoped ... so he'll create a major winner on the next round.

Obviously, if you're a Pronzini collector, you'll pick up a copy of THE VIOLATED anyway. Go for it.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

The Other Kind of Scandinavian Crime Fiction, from Helene Tursten (Swedish)

The eighth in Helene Tursten's Detective Inspector Irene Huss series releases December 15 in the United States, thanks to Soho Crime and translator Marlaine Delargy. THE TREACHEROUS NET (a 2008 title in Sweden) picks up with DI Huss as she's adapting to an empty nest. She and her chef husband Krister mark time at home by looking forward to the next visit from their 22-year-old twin daughters, while Irene's career life has turned stagnant. That's in large part due to her new superior, Superintendent Efva Thylqvist, who values the men on the Violent Crimes Squad, but not Irene. Isolated, nearly silenced, it's a bad time for her.

So when two murdered teens are found in the same week, Irene's determined not to let her superintendent steer the cases into the hands of only the men -- and her actions to hold a major role in the investigations mean she's confronting Thylqvist in risky ways, daily.

Add to this the overload on the squad, during a gang war, and the sudden appearance of a body walled up in a cellar, with indications that the death happened decades ago, and Irene's in the midst of the chaos that's become familiar in the preceding seven books: In Göteborg, Sweden, as in most other modern cities, crime races ahead of the available police force.

For Irene Huss, the overload and the simultaneous need to fight for her role in the squad mean she's not the cheerful, appreciative spouse that Krister expects for his spaghetti Bolognese dinner. In the face of his mild sympathy, Irene's ready to sound off, and dump, and admit she's upset by the violent deaths of the young women she's just witnessed.

"It's strange; I don't usually let things get to me, but these cases are just so tragic," she said.

Krister nodded sympathetically. "The two girls were so young, and then you find the mother of one of them dead. Perhaps this case is getting to you because you're a mother yourself. Our girls might be twenty-two, but you never stop worrying," he said.

"This killer worries me. I don't want another teenage girls to go the same way, but we're not sure how he gets in touch with them. We suspect it might be through the Internet, some youth site maybe."

And that, of course, is one of the aspects the book's title refers to -- the "treacherous" 'Net, where lonely and naive young women can be lured into "dates" that turn out to be a kidnapper's dream. For these two girls, at least, the process is already fatal -- and Irene soon realizes that the killer must be grooming multiple potential victims, as she sorts out the names he's using online. At least one of the girls has left a trail that Irene can soon see, as the teen had "walked straight into a trap. She had allowed herself to be drawn into the treacherous net. Easy prey."

Readers of earlier books in this series will be familiar with Irene's irascible and sexist but unquestionably effective former superintendent, Sven Andersson, whose health issues have sidelined him to the Cold Cases Unit and a short road toward retirement. While Irene struggles for traction on the predator and the cases, past and future, Andersson himself is caught in a net tossed by Superintendent Thylqvist, dragooned into tackling the case of the walled-up body. He too is facing a back story that involves a net -- this time possibly short for network, as in espionage, and perhaps taking the newly discovered corpse all the way back to the Second World War and related resistance.

Delargy's translation is straightforward and workable, as she lets the crime-solving unfold from its two major directions. It's hard to tell whether the slight stiffness to the text is a result of losing the rhythm of the original words, or actually part of a somewhat more formal, less time-pressed sort of mystery that Tursten's developed. Swedish cultural specialties, from the treat called a Princess Cake, to the joint vacation season for all the investigators, to the national unease around wartime history, stand out clearly here. Unlike the classics that Americans have often read in the Scandinavian field (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; the Wallander series from Henning Mankell), Tursten's investigator isn't drowning in depression, or seasonal affective disorder, or family dysfunction. Huss is easy to identify with, if also a bit frustrating in terms of her slow realization of the politics around her. Then again, aren't we all a bit slow to see the larger pattern?

Once Irene is on the right track, though, her pursuit is relentless, and eventually effective. Andersson's parallel investigation isn't as direct, and I thought it was unfortunate that it "bookends" the book itself, so we lose Irene completely as the narrative wraps up -- an odd choice of pacing. However, now that I've savored this series for so long, I suspect the move is to set up another Tursten book -- there are at least two more that haven't yet crossed from Sweden to America. That's good news: There's plenty of this series ahead.

There's no need to read the earlier books in the series before tackling THE TREACHEROUS NET. The crimes in those titles don't feed into this book, and while Irene Huss's home situation changes from book to book as her daughters grow up and her marriage shifts its ground, there's no particular arc of complication based in her personal life. So go right ahead and dig into this traditional police crime novel -- the other Tursten titles are available via Soho Crime, and have moved into paperback. Check out their reviews here. Thanks, Soho Crime.

Swedish Crime Fiction: THE SECOND DEADLY SIN, Fifth from Åsa Larsson

Åsa Larsson's crime novels repeatedly win major prizes in Sweden; at last the five titles in her Rebecka Martinsson series are all available in English, with this year's release of THE SECOND DEADLY SIN. And this is one of the rare series in which it's really way, way better to start with the first book -- the four earlier titles are The Savage Altar, The Blood Spilt, The Black Path, and Until Thy Wrath Be Past. Reading them in sequence conveys the painful, steady, and yes, heroic path Rebecka Martinsson has taken from posh urban tax attorney to, as we reconnect in THE SECOND SIN, a rural district prosecutor in northern Sweden, where the country's most "backward" and land-loving families live like American "mountain" folk: trusting only each other, and alternately embracing the challenging winter and struggling to survive it.

Rebecka Martinsson's choices in the earlier titles have made her a controversial attorney, one whose hands are stained with blood -- justly or not, well, you'll have to read the others. Let's just say that she's unevenly accepted in her new role up north. A wealthy attorney from the city still comes to see her when she lets him, as her lover, but the relationship makes less sense by the month, as Martinsson's loyalties to her new community intensify.

When multiple "accidental" deaths in a family nearby accrue, Martinsson knows there can't be coincidence at play -- it's malice, wickedness, but what is the motive under the killings of such an impoverished and powerless family? When she and a local cadaver dog wrangler find themselves repeatedly saving the life of a boy who's one of the last to survive from that family, Martinsson decides to root out the criminal force behind the killings. To do it, she'll have to disobey her boss, take a leave of absence, put her job and her new sense of self at risk.

Those who've read others in the series will rejoice to find Police Inspector Ann-Maria Mella, local force for justice in spite of a misogynistic career choice and a family of her own, coming to Martinsson's assistance. The teamwork of the two determined women keeps the investigation in progress. Which is a lifesaving component when you're up against someone like the stunningly lovely but mysterious Maja Larsson, who has reasons of her own for misleading the investigation as the team tries to track down who has killed the boy Marcus's grandmother -- and why:

Larsson stared hard at Martinsson. Like a fox standing motionless in the trees at the edge of the forest, trying to decide if the approaching stranger is friend or foe. In the end she responded. Her voice was low and soft. The silver snakes were wriggling on top of her head.

"I know who you are; you're Rebecka Martinsson. Mikkio's and Virpi's daughter. You've moved back here. I didn't know what you look like nowadays -- I only met you once when you were a little girl. Well, Rebecka, you know what it's like here in the village."

"No, I don't."

"Perhaps you don't. ... People in this village are a lot of bastards but they wouldn't murder her. If I spill the beans and you then go around asking questions, they'll know I've snitched on them. And I'll have stones thrown through my windows."

But it's Rebecka Martinsson who seems likely to become, yet again, a target of the "stone throwers" as she presses against the village's darkest secrets, all to protect a child -- and a dog.

This is not "noir" writing -- it's well-paced traditional crime fiction with a very unusual investigator and dangerous circumstances. Martinsson is one of the best legal sleuths to come along, and I hope the author keeps the series going for years to come.

Meanwhile, considering the pace of translation, I'm willing to return to the first of the series and read all five of them again. (Yes, they are really are THAT good.)

PS -- Can't recall what the second deadly sin was supposed to be? Go ahead, look it up. It's worth remembering it again.

Brief Mentions: Alan Furst, Åsa Larsson, Joelle Charbonneau

Summer schedules can be downright challenging, but the graduations, birthday, and family weddings are over for now, and I have a great stack of mysteries that kept me calm on the inside while dancing through June's gentle chaos. Reviews will roll ...

But here are three titles I won't be reviewing at length this time:

1. Alan Furst, MIDNIGHT IN EUROPE. Furst's pre-World-War-II noir brings Europe in its potent darkness alive, and although technically his books are mysteries (thrillers), they separate from the crowd in two ways: First, we know the upcoming world events that will  follow the action of each book (war will break out, yeah), so the suspense resides in the smaller, personal details of lives and goodness at risk. This time the protagonist is Christián Ferrar, whose efforts in the Spanish Civil War threaten to give him the ultimate reward, as in, "No good deed goes unpunished." (I was eager to get more details of the Spanish Civil War myself ... I'd always been a bit fuzzy about it.) Second, Furst writes with the lush deliberation of a deep literary novel. The drawback for MIDNIGHT IN EUROPE is that this leads to an ending that's hesitant, sweet, but also distant from the press of the plot. Consider it a tease, perhaps, for the sequels we know are en route. Note: Furst's "sequels" are not a series in the traditional sense -- some characters occur in multiple books, but there is no need to read his others before opening up MIDNIGHT IN EUROPE. And yet ... I want each of them on my shelf.

2. Reading Scandinavian noir? You may still not know the name Åsa Larsson; she isn't at the top of the PR lists. But oh my, her books have gripped me this summer. I'm catching up -- I read Sun Storm and The Blood Spilt, and devoured The Black Path, then cruised into the most recent, Until Thy Wrath Be Past. I'm fully committed to the protagonist, lawyer and crime victim and now dogged sleuth Rebecka Martinsson. The fifth book comes to the United States in August, and I've pre-ordered my copy of The Second Deadly Sin. Most intriguing aspect (besides the character of Martinsson): discovering Swedish prejudices and ethnic groups. Mmm.

3. Joelle Charbonneau's widely awaited final book in her YA dystopian series "The Testing" is here -- GRADUATION DAY. It's a fitting finale to Malecia "Cia" Vale's investigation of the powers running her post-apocalyptic world, and distinguishes the series emphatically from its "older sister" in "The Hunger Games." I wasn't entirely happy with the percent of the book that takes place through Cia's thoughts, present tense, but I think that's more a personal taste -- and I suspect the frame is on target for many "young adult" readers who live in the intense present themselves. No major issues of sex or religion in this series -- it's all about power, personal and governmental. Cia is a reluctant leader, but once she accepts the role, the action is nonstop. More about the books at the author website: http://www.joellecharbonneau.com