Crime in Winter's Harsh Landscape: SNOWDRIFT from Helene Tursten

Swedish author Helene Tursten provided a strong police procedural series featuring Detective Inspector Irene Huss, set mostly in urban Gothenburg and portraying the fierce rivalry among police detectives, including the bitter gender and ethnic gaps that persist in today's culture. And that series earned a place on many a crime fiction collector's shelf as either Scandinavian crime fiction or women's police procedurals.

But Tursten's second series is stronger, launched in The Hunting Game (yes, brace for how humans target each other) and then Winter Grave. Her 2020 release through Soho Crime (imprint of Soho Press) is SNOWDRIFT. This is one of the rare crime novels where the book really will make a more dramatic impression on readers who've taken the books in sequence.

Since many Soho Crime authors are less highly advertised than, say, Grisham or Patterson or Penny, this may still be the first Tursten book many readers pick up. So here's a quick backstory: Detective Inspector Embla Nyström tackles violent crime in more than the city of Gothenburg. An avid hunter, she's been out in the winter forests every year. She's also been a competitive boxer and still has those lightning reflexes. But at age 28, she's also landed two traumas that shape her life: One is physical, a mauling described in an earlier book that gave her so much head damage that she won't be able to compete in the ring again (though that won't limit her self-defense). The other, and the root of the plot in SNOWDRIFT, is her acute sense of responsibility for a girlfriend's disappearance under violent threat. She's been searching for her friend Lollo ever since—and suffering crippling nightmares that affect her professional life.

So when she gets a terribly short phone call from Lollo herself, at the start of the book, nothing can dissuade her from investigating where her friend may be, and under what duress. Shortly thereafter, she pays a courtesy call and discovers a mob murder. The victim is one of the criminals who abducted Lollo, years before.

Suddenly Embla and her colleagues are neck deep in international intrigue and danger, along with all the prime areas of Eastern European criminal activity, including human trafficking. Is that what's happened to Lollo?

Marlaine Delargy's translation from the Swedish provides a slight flattening to the dialogue, without the rhythms of native English. To some readers, that may make the book feel "more Scandinavian" in its stiffness. Tursten's rapid pacing and portrayal of the risks and bonds of team policing override most of the drawback of the language, along with Embla's overwhelming sense of threat and peril. 

Series readers and first-timers alike may find it necessary to ignore the phone and email, and embed themselves in this dramatic winter crime novel. Brace for a page-turner, and enjoy this fierce new police procedural turned thriller, with its engaging and memorable "wounded" detective.

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

Provocative and Entertaining Dystopian Novel: EARLY RISER from Jasper Fforde

[Originally published in the New York Journal of Books]

Taking Early Riser into the summer reading stack will be surprisingly refreshing. Even though it arrives with both love, and a shiver of foreboding.

Dystopian fiction has become a necessary aspect to our politically unsettled and climate-challenged lives, and there’s a new longing for Joseph Campbell’s heroic figures to show us how to survive with honor and preserve a thriving planet.

As Jaspar Fforde leaps into the genre, an adult level of frustration and chaos appears: Early Riser, unlike Fforde’s long series of literary spoofs, lifts its curtain on despair and death, moderated by the equivalent of Big Pharma. Charlie Worthing, a novice “winter consul” allowed to stay awake for the frigid months of the new form of winter—while most people lie in a drug-induced sleep to save energy—seeks the source of viral dreams that are infecting sleepers and the awake. For Charlie, the dreams overlap the strange things going on around him: manipulations by two sides of the culture clash, and provoked disappearances of those who might be able to object.

What makes Early Riser unforgettable, though, is not the particular form of dystopia Fforde displays, but the affection and loyalty that Charlie and some of his new acquaintances turn into effective action against pharmaceutical giant HiberTech. Even as Charlie tackles his first assignment, taking a “soul-dead” individual named Mrs Tiffen to be parted out and recycled, the small details of humanity catch at him like “stick-tights” caught walking across a field of seeding plants: “Mrs Tiffen could play the bouzouki,” he notes at the opening of the book. “Not well, and only one tune: ‘Help Yourself’ by Tom Jones.  … She and I had not exchanged an intelligent word since we met five hours before, and the reason was readily explained: Mrs Tiffen was dead, and had been for several years.”

As Charlie confronts his first wakeful winter—where a mild day is around minus forty degrees—he also notes how hard he finds it to believe that a person who can play the bouzouki is no longer a person. Alive. Loving.

Affection becomes Charlie’s own melted area. His Morphenox-twisted dreams and the viral psychopathy infusing the people he meets mingle with an artifical affair he’s been dragged into—the highly attractive (but crazy?) Birgitta needs him to pretend to adore her. “‘The best relationships always begin like a bad rom-com in my experience. I’ll find a tartan travel rug and a picnic set for the Sno-Trac,’ she added, now quite enthused by the whole idea.”

Fforde sweeps the action forward briskly, unafraid of mythologizing as he goes along, complete with Villains with a capital V. He conflates Winter with the possibility of global evil, so that Charlie admits, “The citizenry didn’t know or care what the Consuls did during the cold to keep them safe, they just wanted to wake alive in the Spring, same as always. For many people, the Winter didn’t really exist except in an abstract sort of way, and by consequence, neither did we.”

The book couldn’t be further from a “beach book” in its details, yet the cover catches a bit of the viral dreaming from the story and offers a beach scene (sprinkled with snow). It’s a good hint for this season: Taking Early Riser into the summer reading stack will be surprisingly refreshing. Even though it arrives with both love, and a shiver of foreboding.

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

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Sarah Graves, New Maine Series: WINTER AT THE DOOR

Sarah Graves, Maine author of the clever "Home Repair Is Homicide" thriller series, launched a new series this month with WINTER AT THE DOOR. The great plus of introducing protagonist Lizzie Snow, a homicide investigator from Boston who's just taken a job in the Great North Woods of Maine, is Lizzie's knowledge of crime and investigation -- she's a professional, and used to taking care of herself. Within limits.

But Graves gives us a glimpse -- and only a glimpse -- of the wounds still bleeding for Lizzie. Something's gone terribly wrong in her family. It appears one of her relatives may have survived: a nine-year-old niece, Nicki. And the tip Lizzie Snow has, from her former (and faithless) boyfriend Dylan, says Nicki may be a hostage of some sort, living in the near-lawless wilderness of Aroostook County. That's why Lizzie's taken the anti-career move to the rural region. And it's already looking grim: Instead of a patrol slot, Sheriff Cody Chevrier has a grubby little office for her, and an assignment in community policing. Color Lizzie NOT impressed.

Still, Chevrier's move is a complex one. He's not just staffing an unexpected grant-funded position -- he's sneaking an experienced homicide cop into a situation where retired police officers around him are dying of assumed suicide, and he's convinced they've been murdered.

Lizzie does luck out in adopting, or really being adopted by, a local assistant willing to rehab her office practically overnight, bring in the communications gear she needs, and even walk her suddenly added canine companion for her. Of course, the Tattoo Kid -- nicknamed Spud, in this wide potato-farming region -- looks like a walking nightmare, with his piercings and more. But he's surprisingly competent, and for a while, Lizzie feels like she's got some good luck after all.

That is, until Dylan Hudson shows up, in the very manly flesh, to complicate almost everything. Turns out he's tracking criminal activity up here, too, and Lizzie can't deny there's still chemistry between them, even though she has every reason never to trust him in her personal life again.

Back to the title: This suspenseful two-track criminal investigation opens at the end of October, which in the north country really is the season of "winter at the door." But couldn't that expression also apply to the cold evil of a malicious psychopath loose in the area? And could Lizzie's missing niece be part of the same possible crime wave that's killing the sheriff's old colleagues?

Graves alternates points of view between Lizzie and the criminals here, which in many mysteries would lead to some sympathy for the wrongdoers. But not this time. In fact, I hadn't realized this Maine author could write the dark side so deftly and effectively -- I shuddered at a number of points.

This one is a good winter read, tightly plotted and all too believable. And if I quibbled with a couple of issues -- the distraction of not one but two suitors for Lizzie, her lack of teamwork, and a finale that didn't quite follow through on the level of evil proposed earlier in the book -- I also found this a compelling start to an exciting series. Grab this first title, and clear room on the shelf for the next one: The Girls She Left Behind. Considering the plot threads left unresolved at the end of WINTER AT THE DOOR, I'm already shivering with foreboding. I'll be following Lizzie Snow, for sure.

Haunted Maine Town, Haunted Investigator: THE WOLF IN WINTER, John Connolly

Each new death in our lives echoes against the earlier ones, and sets them ringing in us like a string of bells, brushed by a passing hand. Sometimes it's gentle music -- and sometimes discordant. But I have never been to a funeral, or read an obituary, without thinking of some long-passed friend or relative, and feeling an amplified loss.

How much more so must it be for a private investigator like Charlie Parker of Maine, who's seen so many tragedies. As THE WOLF IN WINTER from John Connolly opens, he and his partners in, well, vengeance maybe, or crime protection, think they've finally cornered a criminal mastermind who's killed one of their friends. There will be many chapters to go before the impact of the scene comes back into the action -- and the next chapter, from the point of view of a wolf just arriving from Canada into Maine in bitter cold, will also seem obscure for a while. But if you're a series reader, you're already aware, in the echo with earlier Charlie Parker investigations, that the wolf could parallel either a psychopathic killer or, in the sense that it's alone with its wounds, Charlie himself.

Then the action takes over.

A homeless man in Portland, Maine, Jude, has been trying to track down his daughter. It looked like he was finally about to have "family" again -- and then his daughter disappeared, and the treatment center further north where she'd been recovering is baffled, too. Then Jude dies, in circumstances that Charlie quickly realizes are staged murder ... and in a way that leaves Charlie Parker the emotional legacy of taking Jude's "missing persons" case. Where did that young woman vanish?

All paths lead to the historic rural town of Prosperous, Maine, which appears to have struck a virtual deal with a devil to prosper for centuries, against the odds. The town's leadership is ingrown and odd; the minister of its gargoyle-decorated and peculiar church even more so. Charlie attempts to call Pastor Warraner into his own mission:

"I'm searching for a missing girl. If she's alive, she's in trouble. If she's dead, someone else is. As an individual who professes to be a man of god, I'd suggest that your compassion is currently misdirected."

Warraner plunged his  hands into the pockets of his jeans as though he feared the damage he might otherwise inflict on me. He was a big man, and strong as well. If he got his hands on me, he'd do some harm. Of course, I'd shatter one of his knees before he got that close, but it wouldn't look good on my résumé. Still, all of his weight was on his left leg, which was ramrod straight. If he moved, I'd take him.

Warraner breathed deeply to calm himself and recover his dignity. The moment passed.

"You know nothing of my god, Mr. Parker," he said solemnly.

But Charlie has already guessed a lot about what's wrong in the town, and if he still has a hope of finding the missing girl, it's small, and growing fainter.

Between the steady increase of suspense, the tension in Charlie himself, and the sense that Charlie and his own friends are going to have to tackle an entire town, this thriller kept me racing from one chapter to the next. Except there are also deep things here, and not just under the town's motivations. Here's the scrap from late in the book that convinced me I'll be reading this one again, and again:

He believed that men created gods as much, if not more, than gods created men. If this old god existed, it did so because there were men and women who permitted it to continue to exist through their beliefs. They fed it, and it, in turn, fed them.

It's necessary to accept that level of presence of the "paranormal" in this page-turner, and maybe a wee bit more, but ... I'm a hard-core, non-paranormal reader, and THE WOLF IN WINTER struck me as making complete sense. When the wolves of greed and pride are loose in the landscape, there's going to be an echo, a response.

Those bells are ringing again.