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!

 

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.

 

Crime Fiction, or Science Fiction? Eric Rickstad's REMOTE: THE FIVE (The Remote Series Book 2)

It's rare that a publisher and author can dance their calendars so well that book 2 in a series is published before you've lost the stinging memories of book 1 -- but Eric Rickstad and Blackstone Publishing have made it work, just in time for some properly creepy summer reading.

Book 1 in the series, called Remote: The Six, released on April 8; this week, book 2, REMOTE: THE FIVE, is available. Although it's an author's job to give enough scaffolding so you can jump into a later book in a series and not feel lost, the double premises behind Rickstad's plotting mean you'll appreciate this new volume more if you've read the first one; I'll paste that review below, since the publication where it appeared abruptly vanished this spring (alas).

Premise 1: Serial killings of entire families are taking place, with FBI Special Agent Lukas Stark assigned to identify the murderer and stop him. Means and opportunity aren't hard to pull together, but motive depends on this next part --

Premise 2: Gilles Garnier, also known as X, is one of six people raised with a new-to-humans ability: They can "remote view," that is, see and hear what's happening in some other location. The killings are his part of his psychotic effort to find or create other remote viewers.

 Hold on -- before you discard the notion as too far from reality, bear in mind that the author's "discussion topics" from the first book reveal that he's based this on a CIA research program, historically real. He's clearly spent major effort on the FBI procedures involved in Agent Stark's efforts, too. In effect, Rickstad is shifting a dark crime novel just a bit further along into what the future could bring -- so in that sense, park this book in the "dystopian" genre, too. And who isn't grimly interested in dystopian fiction just now, in an effort to understand what's going on in our scary global situations??

As REMOTE: THE FIVE opens, it seems another of the remote viewers, S, is turning to murder: 

This woman, suspected of the murders of two MIT researchers in the field of bioengineering and genome modification, had the same strange scar on the back of her neck that Garnier and Q had. This woman whom Garnier suspected of being manipulated by the program, as was Q, into murdering a list of individuals in the hope of maintaining or strengthening their fading remote-viewing abilities. Of course, it might really have been only a test by the program to see how far the two would go to maintain their ability—to determine how strong their addiction to that power really was. 

There's that dystopian note: "addiction to power."

Stark and Garnier head in separate directions, each pursuing a persistent hunch about the ongoing murders. The FBI agent has his own twist: He seems unable to let go of pursing the case, even when his own wife and small child are in enormous danger. And Garnier appears to be dying. So, will the case be solved before Garnier can't even walk and wake, or before Stark carries his own trauma from childhood into another generation?

If you like all threads neatly tidied by the end of a book, don't try this one -- there are quite a few strands left dangling at the end, and there's little resolution of the threats that seem only to deepen. But for those hooked on the estrangement and bitterness of noir (or related dystopia), this is a prime candidate for book of the summer. Of course, the sequence of titles and the rough-edged ending to REMOTE: THE FIVE make it clear there are more books ahead in the series, so it's understandable that threads dangle. Rickstad has left more of them unresolved than is usual, so book 3 will need to carry a lot of power.

Let's see how soon the next book will come to the shelves!

 

BOOK 1 review, originally published in the New York Journal of Books:

Remote: The Six, The Remote Series Book 1 by Eric Rickstad 

Kudos to Blackstone for opting to release both of the first two books in Eric Rickstad’s new Remote Series within the same year: book 1 now, and book 2 in July. The suspense raised by this new thriller, Remote: The Six, could otherwise be close to unbearable—because Rickstad is a master of suspense and quickly ramps up both tension and personal threat for FBI Special Agent Lukas Stark. On the road, constantly falling behind the attacks of a brutal serial killer, Stark is all too aware that this man is deliberately assaulting families. Like his own, his wife and eight-year-old son, whom he hasn’t seen in literally months, thanks to his job.

 

Stark appears to be mostly a lone hunter, with support from forensic teams wherever he lands to assess the latest deaths. “The FBI had not been brought in until the third murdered family … made it clear through MO—victims bound to chairs, wife’s throat cut, father and children bludgeoned—that there was likely a single killer working across state lines.” So he’s doing his own assessments, asking creative questions, probing behavioral and psychological patterns. Rickstad doesn’t hold back on the twists from the start: Just a few pages in, Stark reflects that he knows “all too well the bloody fingerprint a father’s violence left on a son’s soul.”

 

So in many ways, Stark’s solo hunting for the serial killer is a perfect fit for his own damaged self. Alas, he’s got less than one chapter of the book to hunt that way, as his superior, an FBI Special Agent in Charge, arrives without warning on the latest crime scene, with a very strange civilian in tow. Stark is expected to take on as a partner this peculiar and intrusive man, who reminds him of “a secretary bird, which takes flight only when pressed by imminent danger.”

 

Yet this is also the moment when Rickstad’s ground-shaking crime novel crosses over into speculative fiction (what used to be only called sci fi), because Gilles Garnier has his own way of searching for the perpetrator: something called remote viewing, which lets him see what someone else is looking at.

 

Stark’s very unhappy with the notion, which reminds him of course of all the fraudulent or at best useless psychics he’s already seen in action. Rickstad then cleverly braids together several long processes: of Stark revealing only to himself his own internal damage, of the frustrations of the serial killer, and of Gilles Garnier confessing what he’s actually doing, and how he’s gained the capacity to do it. (For those who hate crawling inside the minds of gruesome killers and their terrified victims, this book’s a good thriller for you, because those aspects don’t take up a lot of the narrative.) The pacing is impressive, the dialogue and twists highly satisfying, and by the time Stark himself is unraveling, it’s all too clear why.

 

Equally intriguing is Stark’s own theory of the killer, which involves a biochemical form of addiction to arousal. He’s aware that the theory makes him an outsider, and even Gilles Garnier agrees it will put off the other professionals: “Addiction implies a lack of free will, of personal responsibility.” But might this be the case anyway?

 

This is indeed book 1, so there are a couple of scary dangling threads at the end. (Not long to wait until they’re back in play, with July 8 the predicted release date for book 2, Remote: The Five.) But Rickstad also offers some startling information in his promotional “discussion topics,” which include the presence of historically real serial killers in his home state, and a CIA research program, also historically real, on remote viewing. Maybe the sci-fi side of the book is actually a view into something scary and very possible, after all.

 

 

Nordic Noir in 13th Harry Hole Crime Novel from Jo Nesbø, KILLING MOON

 [Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“Nesbø never releases the heartstrings through an otherwise classic dark police procedural.”

 

Harry Hole, depressed Norwegian detective, has fled to California as the 13th book in this “Nordic noir” detective series opens. It takes one to know one, they say, and an aging actress and gambling addict named Lucille, hanging out in the bar with him, nails Harry as running as running away from something—his wife? No, she’s dead. “Ah. You’re running from grief,” Lucille readily assesses.

 

For Harry, that could be both the sum and his ending, since he’s ready to give up on everything. But (with plenty of Leonard Cohen lyrics along the way) it turns out that seeing Lucille assaulted because of her gambling debts wakes up the protective side of this aging police detective. And that, in turn, readies him to accept a return to Norway to solve a crime, provided he can get a big enough fee to pay off Lucille’s life.

 

It's a poignant and emotional way to pull Harry Hole back into action, and Nesbø never releases the heartstrings through an otherwise classic dark police procedural. DNA analysis, cocaine trafficking, violent crime—it all piles up across nearly 500 pages of detection. Alternating points of view bring in forensic sleuth Alexandra Sturdza, as well as a highly unpleasant set of manipulative criminals. Sturdza, despite her first gray hairs, is glad to recall once being told “her body was a cross between a tiger and a Lamborghini” and her wry comments and quirky expertise add fun to the narrative.

 

As detective novels go, this one is on the edge of being a thriller, since there’s a “ticking clock” for Harry Hole to discover and arrest a serial killer. Technically, he’s only got to prove his client didn’t do the crime, in order to have the needed funds wired to his bar buddy Lucille’s account and get her released. But of course, proving innocence is much more direct if someone else is clearly guilty. Because he’s on a short time leash, Hole takes bigger risks and cuts more legal corners than might be wise. It makes sense, in the context, and it ramps up the suspense.

 

Fans of the series will find this sleuth’s grief and loss powerful, and will appreciate how life forces Harry back into the work he does so well. Newcomers to Nesbø’s well-established investigations won’t struggle for context, though; Harry Hole’s sense of blame for his wife’s death and his overwhelming need to accept responsibility for another life are quickly established and push the plot.

 

At the core of Killing Moon is the painful reawakening of attachment in Harry’s life, through reconnecting with an old flame and her child. It’s a terrific contrast to the self-centered menace of criminals, and lets Nesbø dip into more classic tunes, beyond Leonard Cohen. The most satisfying lullaby Harry can offer to a child turns out to be “a low, slow chanting in a rough voice that now and then hit the notes of an old blues song about the perils of cocaine.” Truth seems to be the best currency with this child. For Harry, that in itself offers more risk and pain.

 

At the same time, it provides another hostage to keep Harry Hole investigating, as a new kidnapper invites Harry to check out the night’s moon: “You can see the eclipse is under way. When the moon is completely covered,” the villain offers, he’s going to slit the throat of someone Harry loves.

 

Running away from grief? Rephrase that: Once again, Harry Hole is running for the sake of love.

 

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

Fresh Updated LA Noir from Daniel Weizmann, THE LAST SONGBIRD

 

[Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“Weizmann’s updated LA noir storytelling is pitch perfect, so this quirky investigator stands in for each of us, committing in a fumbling fashion to doing what’s right even though we’re not equipped for the journey.”

 

Pull up that poignant song about driving a beautiful woman in your taxi cab and never forgetting her. Hold onto the emotion—now, pin the story to Los Angeles, to the brutal competitiveness of performance and production, and to the significance of small and persistent acts of kindness.

 

Too saccharine? Fear not. Daniel Weizmann roughs up the story of a Lyft-driving songwriter on the night streets as he hard-boils affection, friendship, loyalty. That means grit, lots of it, from drug-fueled disasters to twisted personal secrets.

 

Yet The Last Songbird, personified here by aging yet still famous folksinger Annie Linden, never quite loses the heartache and beauty of the old songs. By the time driver Adam Zantz trusts Annie Linden enough to share his own songs with her (he writes both the lyrics and the melodies) in the strange privacy of his hired car, she’s also won his faithfulness. When she and her bodyguard are brutally murdered (with Adam a suspect, of course), there’s only one mission possible: find the killer and bring them to justice. Even though that won’t bring Annie back, it will let Adam keep hearing and feeling the support of her voice.

 

“She was a songwriter’s songwriter, a taker of lyrical chances,” Adam clarifies. Annie’s become his antidote to despair, too: “Annie Linden, my Annie Linden, never had any place to hide. Because she believed in love, like a religious devotee. She said as much to me on the road when I asked her where her songs came from.”

 

Extra horseradish on the side for this dish of neo-noir, please, since Adam (Addy to his friends) presents a Jewish flavor to all his choices. His friends twist toking and Torah, like Ephraim Freiberger, aka Double Fry, who explains that his paparazzi work is bounded by not selling any photos that could embarrass someone. Addy checks this: “Embarrassing someone is strictly forbidden?” Double Fry responds, “By the Torah, it’s like murder.”  Tough boundary for a photo career in LA, though!

 

Adam’s songwriting future may be dead in the water with Annie’s murder—she was the first and only significant person who’d believed in his work—and the darkness of his nights, with its long ugly driving shifts through LA’s special brand of despair and denial, threatens his inner life as well. But under Double Fry’s pressure, he nails his urge to solve the crime: “I owe her—for giving me hope when I had zero. And I’m pissed. ‘Cause if I don’t find out who—If I don’t find out who [killed her], maybe nobody will.”

 

The clumsy but persistent efforts of this spur-of-the-heartache amateur sleuth pull him into danger, of course, as well as waves of anguish over his past and over his desperation to “make good” to Annie’s memory. Weizmann’s updated LA noir storytelling is pitch perfect, so this quirky investigator stands in for each of us, committing in a fumbling fashion to doing what’s right even though we’re not equipped for the journey.

 

Of course, classic noir would spit Adam back out in misery at the end. Case solved, or not? Annie still an inspiration to him, or lost in the clutter of her own revealed mistakes? Things change: An author who creates a Torah-hugging buddy for his protagonist can’t be consigning the case, or Adam’s songs, or hope itself to the dumpster. Best of all, in a new twist on noir (but a definite plug for those taxi-now-Lyft drivers), a playlist of the book’s songs wraps up this irresistible tale, putting all the half-spoken secrets back into active memory. Van Morrison, anyone? Mick Jagger? Dylan? Who is the “last songbird” that you’ll hear bringing you home?

 

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

Brief Mention: Dark Revenge Crime Fiction from Eli Cranor, OZARK DOGS

My home-grown measure of a good crime novel is the number of people I'd like to give a copy to. On that scale, alas, OZARK DOGS by Eli Cranor scored really low. 

And it's not because of the violence. Anyone reading dark stuff, "noir," knows how to handle that. Plus I really appreciated Cranor's earlier crime novel, Don't Know Tough.

Partly it's because nothing turns out right for anyone in this Southern thriller with a missing teen and her secretive granddaughter.

But the bigger part is because it paints a compelling image of "country folk" as violent, menacing, and ready to hold deadly grudges across generations (the pre-publication publicity even mentioned Hatfield–McCoy blood feud). Cranor is such a convincing writer that readers run a risk of thinking this Southern Gothic shows the real world.

Sure, you can put menace and despair into fiction, and maybe some readers won't take it personally. But give me a choice and I'll take the way Randall Silvis handles the theme instead, where courage and loyalty have as much of a presence as the junkyard dogs and the weapons.

Get a copy if you want to go really, really bleak. Just don't blame me if you drop into a week of depression or waste the grocery money on chocolate, to recover.

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

New Tight, Dark Canadian Hard-Boiled from Vern Smith, SCRATCHING THE FLINT

Run Amok Crime Fiction releases today/tomorrow a new hard-boiled detective novel from Vern Smith. SCRATCHING THE FLINT continues to wind his dark twists tighter, until explosion is inevitable. Set in pre 9/11 Toronto, the book opens with a grim killing of a squealing witness that implicates a sleazy lawyer in the messy patterns of mob execution.

Hard-boiled as a genre is saturated with rage and impulse; Smith takes it a layer deeper by leaking the real precursor to rage, the inner morass of doubt and shame invading lives spent avoiding human connection. Here's Gordon, for instance:

First came Gordon's return to drink, falling down after last call in front of the Bovine Sex Club, breaking his wrist, claiming he did it rollerblading. The emergency doctor prescribed enough painkillers to kill all kinds of hurt. Then Gordon was hooked on those, too. Luckily, the cops didn't bother with a blood test three weeks ago, relying only on his breathalyzer reading, 0.81, which was bad enough. That made him not just a bona fide boozer, but a bona fide boozer inside the small world of Toronto journalism. ... Did that make Gordon lowlife? ... And did he even want to know?

Meanwhile, anti-fraud team Alex Johnson and Cecil Bolan (from Smith's earlier short story collection The Gimmick) try to break into the mobbed-up crime ring that Gordon wishes he were good enough to expose — and Gordon sneaks up on their investigation. Not surprisingly, he digs himself into deeper messes, while the detectives circle around the same swamp. At times it's hard to tell the good guys and their guilt from Gordon and his shame ... except Gordon's making worse mistakes because he's so darn scared. 

If you cut your reading teeth on Los Angeles noir, or Donald Westlake's series under his Richard Stark pen name, here's a great chance to step deeper (or, considering Gordon, higher) and grab the bitter disillusionment of modern police challenges and the messy choices that power provides. Oh, and that title? Think a Zippo lighter ... and all the steamy and screwed up moments likely to follow that scratched flint.

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

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. 

From Larry Beinhart ("Wag the Dog"), THE DEAL GOES DOWN

Tony Casella's dream life may be a lot more satisfying than the awake part. He's just been pitched a job as a hit man, while riding a train to a funeral. It's got him confused, but also tempted, because his finances have never been worse. But his thinking is pretty messed up, even in a dream about someone he's sure is dead:

I meanwhile had an ordinary, pleasant, live person's conversation with Owen. He said business was good, but not as good as it had been, big companies largely created through national security money were moving in and everything was going digital. By then, some of my own ghosts were sneaking in, some to taunt, some to make me mourn ... my wife and my son ... to tear my heart out if I'd still had one.

Part New York noir, part unexpected hero, and a big part dark caper novel, this satirical thriller is a lively return to publication for both Larry Beinhart (his previous book was in 2013) and his long-time private eye, Tony Casella. Despite a solid series of detective fiction, Beinhart's probably best known for the film adaptation of his book Wag the Dog (with an all-star cast). So it's good to see THE DEAL GOES DOWN as a solid book-on-paper, with an August 9 release date (time to pre-order it).

This will especially suit Donald Westlake and Walter Moseley fans, as well as readers who've discovered Rory Flynn. Restoring Manhattan Noir is well worth the effort! Brace for a quirky ending ... but then again, why not?

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. 

Indelible Darkness: THE HOUSE OF ASHES by Stuart Neville

In a fierce and powerful twist away from his crime fiction that roots in Ireland's "Troubles," Stuart Neville's September 7 release THE HOUSE OF ASHES (Soho Crime) is a stand-alone stirring the tides of domestic violence. Narrated in two time periods -- a dread-saturated present-day one of Sara Keane, newly arrived in Northern Ireland with an abusive and criminal husband (and his much more frightening father), and a set of multiple murder recollections from 60 years back, in the mind of the elderly Mary Jackson, more or less incarcerated in a "care" home -- this hardboiled thriller paints a shattering image of how absolute power becomes absolute control. Of life, itself.

More than the actual plot, the power of THE HOUSE OF ASHES comes from its blunt revelation of men's potential brutality. It's hard to connect this to the politically scented preceding Neville novels: There's nothing in either Sara's abusers (vintage mob-style dominators) or Mary's (three men who treat women as rape-able animals and kill of their babies) that can be tied directly to the emotional trauma of Irish life. Except one morsel, delivered early in the book through Sara's eyes:

[Sara] had met Damien at the University of Bath, he a postgrad architecture student, she in her second year of studying for a social work degree. She would never have imagined, even after they married, that she would come to live in the place he never ever called Northern Ireland. Always the North, the North of Ireland, sometimes the Six Counties, but never Northern Ireland. As if to speak its name would shame him.

Their move to a house that Damien's father has purchased and rebuilt for them—from a fire-struck wreck—is supposed to be a fresh start, removing Sara from the place where she'd had a breakdown and installing Damien as an architect in his father's property development firm.

But the arrival of a confused elderly woman at the house shatters Sara's preoccupation with staying obedient and blind, and as Mary Jackson's background becomes clear, Sara can't close her eyes to her own situation.

This is a work of psychological horror, drenched in blood, death, and sexual abuse. Perhaps only Stuart Neville could bend the arc of narrative in such a way as to make the story compelling. The terrors revealed and persisting match the book against such classics as Silence of the Lambs, but Neville leaves open the possibility that either Sara or Mary may escape the surrounding real-life nightmare.

It would be comforting to think that this fictional version is a wild exaggeration of abuse that doesn't actually take place in real life. Unfortunately, despite the persisting paranormal threads that are so classically Neville's, this crime novel makes real situations violently present and unforgettable. Read at your own risk ... but trust that the author also knows what impels survival and escape.

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.