This month Stateside readers are enjoying a strong influx of good crime fiction from the Spanish-speaking world, plus a new mystery from one of the community’s rising star authors, Abir Mukherjee. That alone means it’s going to be a good month for readers and armchair (historical) travelers. You’ll find below our choices for the very best new crime novels from around the world coming to the U.S. this May.
Victor del Arbol, Breathing through the Wound (Other Press)
Del Arbol’s A Million Drops was one of 2018’s most complex and powerful thrillers. His follow-up, Breathing Through the Wound, cements his place as one of the most exciting voices in contemporary European noir. In his new novel, a painter grieves the loss of his wife and child with a self-destructive odyssey through Madrid, then finds some new purpose when a woman commissions him to paint a portrait of her own son’s killer. The psychological insights are genuinely unsettling, as is nearly everything in the world del Arbol creates, a vision of Madrid awash in humanity, vice, sadness, and art.
Abir Mukherjee, Death in the East (Pegasus Books)
Mukherjee’s ongoing series following the investigations and adventures of Captain Sam Wyndham and Sergeant Surrender-Not Banerjee in 1920s Calcutta is, as we’ve highlighted elsewhere, one of the most exciting things happening in the crime fiction world. Mukherjee conjures up a vivid world full of surprises and insights, with a pair of main characters as engaging as they come. In Death in the East, Mukherjee flashes from turn-of-the-century London, where a young Wyndham witnesses a brutal crime against a friend, back to Calcutta, where he’s leaving the city for the hills to try to settle his opium addiction. He calls on Banerjee for help when he sees a specter—a man believed dead, involved in that decades-old crime, now in India. Mukherjee provides another exhilarating and erudite story.
Patricio Pron, Don’t Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets (Knopf)
Pron offers up a formally innovative, politically disturbing story about the investigation into a writer’s mysterious death thirty years prior at a conference. The conference was in support of Fascism, and a modern-day interviewer with strong political views launches a series of interviewers of conference-goers in an attempt to make sense of what happened to the deceased writer, what he stood for and what he produced. Readers can expect a crash course in modern political movements, as well as a dark vision of how political beliefs slowly nudge their most ardent followers into life’s most fraught extremes.
Hye-young Pyun, The Law of Lines (Arcade)
A fascinating and chilling story of dovetailing investigations, The Law of Lines is also a powerful story about grief. In one strand, a young woman finds her house burned in a gas explosion and is told her father was one who set the fire. In the other strand, another woman is told of her estranged half-sister’s suicide. Like the other woman, she doesn’t buy the official explanation, and both undertake their own journeys toward the truth. The result is an emotionally powerful and deeply disturbing novel.
Jorge Franco, Shooting Down Heaven (Europa)
Franco is one of Colombia’s leading novelists and has long explored its traumas on the homefront and on the international diaspora. In his latest novel, the son of a narcotrafficker returns home to Meddelin to bury his father, an associate of the notorious Pablo Escobar. Larry and his family have lived an uncanny existence, lavish and dangerously proximate to violence and despair. In the aftermath, he finds his family and friends descending into their new reality. Franco paints a vivid portrait of his home city and of the personal and familial tolls of the criminal life.
Sandrone Dazieri, Kill the King (Scribner)
The Caselli and Torre trilogy has been something of an international phenomenon, and with good reason. Dazieri delivers consistently exhilarating thrillers featuring an engaging pair of detectives whom he puts through just about kind of twists and trauma conceivable. In the trilogy’s final installment, Caselli has left Venice after a bombing, but soon gets drawn back into the hunt, though her partner is missing. Expect plenty of dark conspiracies and some top-notch Venetian detective work.
