Crime Fiction from Nicola Griffith, June's Nebula Grand Master

 Nicola Griffith at center, with her award.

The Nebula Award is for science fiction, not mystery -- but author Nicola Griffith has been able to excel in both genres, so it's a thrill to see her named Grand Master by the sci-fi world this summer. Her acceptance speech is well worth reading, as she talks about "world building" ... something that's also common to crime fiction and historical fiction, not just speculative or sci fi work.

Summer's a great season for discovering a new author and barreling through a series. Thanks to Picador, Griffith's three crime novels featuring Aug Torvingen are newly released in softcover in the US: THE BLUE PLACE (which I just devoured), STAY, and ALWAYS. Check out a long description of Aud (Norwegian born, American by choice, a former police detective now taking specialized private work. In THE BLUE PLACE she agrees to track down a case of art fraud, murder, and a red herring of drugs connected to a Mexican cartel. Why? 

"It's the adrenaline," Aud admits to her new and very close friend Julia. "When everything slows down and my muscles are hot and strong and the blood beats in my veins like champagne I feel this vast delight. Everything is beautiful and precious, and so clear. Light gets this bluish tinge and I feel like a hummingbird among elephants, untouchable."

But that elation and "untouchable" sensation can lead her astray, and does, with nearly unbearable costs. Maybe you'll connect to that part of Aud. Or maybe to the gorgeous descriptive passages of her adopted home area, Atlanta, Georgia, or the home she revisits as a safety location during the crime hunt, Norway, with its mystical winters, stunning landscape, and pervasive legends.

My dad used to say, "Do as I say, not as I do." Let me pass that along to you also: Take Griffith's Aud Torvingen crime novels slowly and luxuriously. Don't devour ... instead, savor. That's what summer was made for.

And here's a postscript from Griffith, to remind you 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 this 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.

 

Naughty and Nice: Three Diverse Crime Novels for Your December List

Three crime fiction treats for your reading pleasure, now that the evenings are so long:

• Barbara Cleverly, INVITATION TO DIE.
• Martin Edwards, GALLOWS COURT.
• Gerry Boyle, RANDOM ACT.

Crime fiction fans are fortunate readers: They can dip deeply into a series, or explore a wide range, and either way, there's some great reading among the 2019 titles!

Let's start close to this reviewer's Vermont location with Gerry Boyle's 2019 title, RANDOM ACT. The 12th in Boyle's highly enjoyable dark crime series featuring Maine journalist Jack McMorrow, this is a gem of action, risk, and vicious crime. Most dangerous in this title is the romantic passion that Jack's Special Forces neighbor Louis drops into ... with a mysterious blond who brings Russian crime attention to the neighborhood. The only risk on this one is that you may need two copies, so you can give one to a friend as a holiday gift and keep the other for your own shelf. Well worth it! (We've been fans of all Boyle's work, always a good read. And Islandport Press does a nice job.)

Can't figure out why I haven't reviewed more of the crime fiction by Martin Edwards. GALLOWS COURT comes via Poisoned Pen Press, which is now a Sourcebooks imprint. Set in London, 1930, it's an astonishing classic sleuth novel featuring a woman detective clearly operating outside the law, Rachel Savernake. Double points of view keep the twists spinning, and the finale meets the quintessential criterion for a good novel: a perfect fit with what's happened, and yet an intense surprise. Reading Jacqueline Winspear, Charles Todd, Barbara Cleverly? Try Martin Edwards and put a pillow over the phone for the duration.

Classic English detective (inspector) fiction, Roaring Twenties, Cambridge, and romance: What a divine mix! This second in Barbara Cleverly's John Redfyre series (the first was Fall of Angels last year) has a delightful set of treats, along with a series of mysterious crimes that involve multiple murders and insight into a "dark and bloody war." A gem of a comment to Detective Inspector Redfyre from a medical examiner in here:

"They say death's a leveller," the doctor murmured, "but I don't know. It's hardly a scientific view, but it always seems to my jaundiced eye to accentuate differences. And sometimes it distorts. Subjects take on a deceptively saintly aspect—and the reverse. Looking at our bloke, I'd say 'saintly,' wouldn't you? He may have been an utter blackguard in life, of course. That's up to you to discover, my friend."

You don't need to read the first in the series, but Cleverly, published by Soho Crime/Soho Press, is a consistently agile and entertaining storyteller; grab this one, and the odds suggest you'll want some or all of the others. (The Joe Sandilands series, her earlier one, is highly satisfying.)

Good luck with your list ... hope this gives you a boost into the season, whether for gifts or for self-spoiling stress relief and delight.

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

Heart-Wrenching Norwegian Sleuth Mystery, BIG SISTER (Varg Veum Series), by Gunnar Staalesen

[Originally published in the New York Journal of Books]

Norwegian author GunnarStaalesen just entered his seventies, and his crime novels date back to when he was 22. Still, he’s not well known in the US because of the lag in translation. Fortunately, for his best-selling series featuring Bergen private investigator Varg Veum, that’s changing. BIG SISTER (originally published in 2016) is the sixth in this series that Don Bartlett has translated, with an easy-to-enjoy casual feel to the writing, and just enough “foreignness” on the tongue to appreciate the Scandinavian backdrop.

Big Sister is not a standard Nordic noir—Varg Veum’s darkest years are done, and he’s settled happily into a long-term relationship with stable lady friend, and a caring if somewhat distant one with his son. He’s not hitting the bottle or any other form of mind-numbing substance. But the opening of the book proves he still has secrets in his own past, or more precisely that of his family, to cope with:  The woman arriving at his office, Norma Johanne Bakkevik, introduces herself as the elderly half-sister he’s never met (she was adopted long before his birth), and wants to be his client in the disappearance of a college student.

Veum’s baffled by the presentation of the case: Nineteen-year-old Emma Hagland, a good student and quiet person, and Norma’s goddaughter, walked out of the apartment she shared with two other young women, and simply vanished. Nobody’s heard from her since. And the police, understandably, decline to take action, since college students are all too likely to move in with boyfriends, relocate due to quarrels, quit school and go on extended vacations, you name it.

Varg’s inclined to that opinion at first, too. But there are a lot of missing or damaged parents in this set-up, including young Emma’s estranged dad, who turns out to be part of a not very pleasant motorcycle club closer to Varg’s own locale. He can’t help noticing the pattern of upheaval and hurt as he investigates (he’s a PI with pretty good police connections).

Most disturbing of all is Veum’s visit to a woman named simply Veslemøy—no surname in use—who’s grown up well cared for in a mental institution and remains almost catatonic, and certainly speechless. This condition followed a long-ago sexual assault on Veslemøy—an assault blamed on the missing teen’s long-gone father, who still associates with a pair of brutal men from those years, leaders of the dangerous motorcycle club.

There’s no big payday likely for Veum in solving this case, if in fact Emma is truly missing. Even worse, the cold case around Veslemøy becomes an obsession for him. Somehow, he’s sure, Emma’s disappearance must connect to this profound disturbance in her family’s past. Veum considers the landscape around Emma herself to be distressingly vague:

I stared into space. I still didn’t have a distinct picture of Emma, but it was beginning to resemble a kind of profile, a bit blurred at the edges, but clear enough for me to see a vulnerable young woman, someone it might be easy to lead astray, someone who was open to approaches, whether well meant or malevolent, someone who could easily become a victim.

This worried me and created a sense of urgency. Perhaps I would have to resort to a few short-cuts, however brutal they might seem to outsiders—or to those concerned.

Veum’s short-cuts take him into confronting a brutality that threatens his life, repeatedly, but that’s not a new experience. Staalesen solves those moments with some “deus ex machina” moves that detract from the emotional power of Veum’s hunt for Emma and his dark plunge into the deadly side of social media. But this minor flaw doesn’t stop the force of the book, and the search for both Veum’s truth and Emma’s makes a fiercely good crime novel, with an unexpected but satisfying final twist.

Despite the Norwegian PI slant, BIG SISTER is far from the darkness of Henning Mankell or Karin Fossom. Consider it a traditional sleuth mystery, with plenty of nontraditional options added. Well worth reading, with the rest of Staalesen’s award-winning series.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.
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Exciting Debut: PAST CRIMES, Glen Erik Hamilton

Reading another author's Facebook musings last month, I noticed her enthusiasm about a debut mystery from Seattle native (and now California resident) Glen Erik Hamilton. So I picked up a copy, and soon was in "can't put it down" mode. As many reviewers have noted, this is a very polished "first novel" -- no signs at all of being a debut. So I've got to wonder what Hamilton has already written, and where it's been published.

But Hamilton hasn't revealed that, in the dozen interviews of him that I've scanned. In fact, the only hint on his writing career is one comment that "moving away from Seattle" made him want to write about the city where he'd grown up. He also admitted to one interviewer that he hadn't actually started out with "I'm going to write a mystery" -- his adventure featuring Army Ranger Van Shaw, who's been in both Iraq and Afghanistan with the elite fighting corps, started with the relationship of Van and his grandfather, Dono (for Donovan; an Irish immigrant). Dono raised Van and trained him, when the boy showed an aptitude for it, in the trade of immaculately planned robberies, midsize to almost large. The kind that are worth doing, but never with a serious risk of being caught, because Dono is such a detailed planner and so careful to note his surroundings.

At first, it's not clear why Van left home -- just that when Dono sends the equivalent (for anyone else's life) of a shout for help ("Come home, if you can"), Van didn't hesitate to apply for leave and race across the globe.

His arrival is literally minutes too late to find out what's wrong. There's been a vicious attack on his grandfather, and the attacker is racing away as Van finds himself pinned to his desperately wounded relative, needing to staunch the bleeding and call for help. Soon he's telling his story to police detectives. And it's a sure thing that he'll be a suspect in spite of all this: His grandfather's shady record emerges right away, and Van's in the hot seat.

Complications quickly snarl around his legs, keeping Van from speedily tracking down the underlying truth of the situation. The police are naturally suspicious of whether Dono's attack came from brothers in crime; Dono's above-board business interests demand Van's attention; secrets abound. He's trying to think on his feet, as he discovers his grandfather's last phone call had been to Ephraim Ganz, a criminal attorney:

What Dr. Singh had asked me earlier that day came flooding back. Did my grandfather have a living will? Christ, was that why Dono had called Ganz? Had he known that trouble was coming?

My fingers gripped the phone, as if testing the limit of strength in my healed arm. Tomorrow was Monday. Ganz's office would be open. Or I could find Hollis.

Addy Proctor had summed it up for me: You have to do something. Or go nuts.

I was halfway to crazy already. It was time to start pushing in the other direction.

As always, what makes a well-plotted crime novel unforgettable is the intensity of the protagonist. Van Shaw's uneasy position, halfway between "trained young thief" and much-appreciated Army Ranger, perched on the edge of a wild land of his grandfather's secrets, turns him into an unlikely and uncomfortable sleuth, one who may decide that balancing the scales of justice is best done personally, rather than through the law.

One more good part about this book: The cover says "A Van Shaw Novel." That's a sure sign there's another one already in the pipeline. And in fact, a quick visit to the author's website (click here) gets you to his blog, which reveals the manuscript for number 2 is already headed to the publisher. Way to go!