Every month, like customs agents with a penchant for literature, we’re scouring the latest imports to these shores looking for the best crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Whether you’re a devotee of Nordic Noir, French crime, or you’re looking for the next big thing from the far corners of the mysterious world, chances are there’s a good book headed your way. Up this month: a Nordic Noir legend, trouble in the South of France, a Japanese locked-room mystery, and more.
Karin Fossum, The Whisperer (HMH)
Fossum has earned her place atop the world of Scandi-Noir and is back Stateside with a dark new novel in the Inspector Sejer series. Sejer is called to investigate threats against a woman living in near reclusive circumstances, alone and locked into her everyday routine, which has recently been disrupted by a series of cryptic notes. Fossum’s pacing is always pitch perfect, and her stories open into something darker and more penetrating than you’ll ever see coming.
Read an excerpt from The Whisperer on CrimeReads.
Edoardo Albinati, The Catholic School (FSG)
Edoardo Albinati’s enormous novel of Italy in the 1970s is only partly a crime novel, but in a book this huge, even partially still means at least 200 pages. Albinati’s novel is derived from his own experiences growing up in a divided Italy, and the crime portion concerns the real-life Circeo Massacre, in which three men from wealthy families kidnapped and assaulted two teenage girls, a case that would draw attention to enormous inequality and the unchecked powers of the rich.
Read an excerpt from The Catholic School on CrimeReads.
Juli Zeh, Empty Hearts (Doubleday)
At once a wildly inventive thriller and a biting piece of social commentary, Zeh’s Empty Hearts, a breakout hit in Germany, arrives in the States at a prescient moment. The story is set in a near-future Germany, which is under the rule of an extreme populist regime and under the cloud of a general malaise bordering on collective depression. Our protagonist, Britta, runs a suicide prevention clinic, but moonlights as a recruiter for terrorists in search of candidates for suicide bombs. When her database is stolen, a tense, deeply ambivalent chase begins. This is one of the stranger, more powerful and thought-provoking novels you’ll come across this year.
Fred Vargas, This Poison Will Remain (Penguin Books)
From the fiendishly clever and ever-so erudite medievalist-turned-crime writer Fred Vargas comes a new Inspector Adamsberg mystery, in which the Inspector must solve the mysterious deaths of three octogenarians killed by…wait for it…POISONOUS SPIDER VENOM! So if you’re freaked out by spiders, this one’s not for you, but everyone else should have a grand old time reading it.
Read an excerpt from This Poison Will Remain on CrimeReads.
Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police (Pantheon)
Yoko Ogawa’s thought-provoking tale of a dystopian island where objects—and the memories thereof—continuously disappear is a perfect exercise in metafiction. The Memory Police follows a novelist who subtly resists the various vanishings imposed upon her by her society, even as she outwardly allows the memories of all that has been banned to fade from her consciousness. When her editor is about to be arrested by the eponymous Memory Police, who quietly remove all those from society who prove incapable of forgetting, the novelist takes him into hiding—and soon becomes a target of the Memory Police herself.
Read an excerpt from The Memory Police on Literary Hub.
Sara Lövestam, The Truth Behind the Lie (Minotaur)
Lövestam’s new novel brings the PI narrative into the world of contemporary issues. When a young child is kidnapped, her mother hires a political refugee and radical journalist moonlighting as an off-the-books private eye to track her down. Lövestam is a Swedish author who writes in a number of genres, but whose works are united by their shared humanism.
