The Best International Crime Fiction of June

Alas, there are only four works in translation that I could find for June that counted as crime fiction, but what crime novels they are! It’s a great batch of mystery, noir, and suspense below, with meddling kids in China, mysterious housekeepers in Sweden, murderous mourners in Japan, and vengeful sisters in Brazil.

Zijin Chen, Bad Kids
Translated by Michelle Deeter
(Pushkin Press)

Bad Kids is about all kinds of morally compromised people, of all ages. When three teens come across the footage of a middle aged man’s murder of his in-laws, they decide to blackmail him. They’re also understandably worried about retribution for some of their own acts, and it’s a toss-up if the law will catch them first or the target of their blackmail. You’ll find yourself rooting for these scrappy outlaws, despite their occasionally heinous acts, as they take on the symbols of vast authority. A perfect noir for modern China!

M. T. Edvardsson, The Woman Inside
Translated by Rachel Wilson-Broyles
(Celadon)

A struggling father takes in a new lodger in Edvardsson’s chilling latest, impressed by his tenant’s commitment to her studies and bolstered by her job as a housekeeper for a wealthy, powerful couple. His tenant grows fond her new landlord and his daughter, and increasingly suspicious of the strange dynamic between the controlling husband and frail wife in the house she cleans. When the couple turns up dead, and the tenant falls under suspicion, a host of dark secrets is bound to be revealed. Edvardsson already impressed me greatly with A Nearly Normal Family, and The Woman Inside firmly establishes him as One to Watch.

Seishi Yokomizo, The Devil’s Flute Murders
Translated by Jim Rion
(Pushkin Press)

Another fiendishly complex mystery from the master of locked room murders, Seishi Yokomizo, The Devil’s Flute Murders revolves around the murder of a composer in post-war Tokyo. Yokomizo’s iconically scruffy Kosuke Kindaichi is called in to solve the murder, and finds himself racing to find the killer as the body count grows. Atmospheric, chilling, and structurally complex.

Itamar Vieira Junior, Crooked Plow
Translated by Johnny Lorenz
(Verso)

Two sisters find a sharp, ancient knife in a suitcase stashed under their grandmother’s bed. Moments later, blood and loss have changed them forever, and the lingering effects of their discovery follow them through life as subsistence farmers on a remote plantation. Magic, social realism, and deep character studies grounded in a complex community are the hallmarks of this brilliant novel from a rising voice in Brazil. There’s also soon to be an HBO miniseries! Oh, excuse me. A Max miniseries.