Every month, like customs agents with a penchant for literature and a dash of intrigue, 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. This month brings fantastic noir and traditional mysteries from Scandinavia, Japan, and Korea, as well as the debut novel out of Nigeria that has everyone talking.
Helene Tursten, An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good (Soho)
This collection of linked stories, from the author behind the popular Irene Huss, is morbid, mysterious, and outrageously funny. The stories feature Maud, an 88 year old woman living in Sweden who has very particular ideas about how life ought to be lived and what should happen to people who disrupt the calm of her golden years. That is to say, she’s willing, and sometimes even eager, to kill those who cross her. This collection is a wonderful example of the more uproarious side of Scandinavian Noir, one that doesn’t often reach our shores and should be savored when it does.
Keigo Higashino, Newcomer (Minotaur)
Newcomer is a complex and insightful procedural from one of Japan’s best loved mystery authors. The story features Detective Kyochiro Kaga of the Tokyo Police Department, on special assignment in the city’s Nihonbashi neighborhood. A murder investigation quickly becomes an inquiry into the past and present of an entire district of the city. Higashino uses a classic crime conceit passed down straight from Christie—everyone’s a suspect—as a tool for examining the intricate and surprising links that bind a community, and sometimes tear it apart. This is a wonderful mix of traditional mystery and dark procedural, a worthy addition to the many fine Japanese crime stories coming to the US this year.
Hideo Yokoyama, Seventeen (FSG/MCD)
From the internationally bestselling author of Six Four, probably the best reporter mystery I’ve ever read, comes Seventeen, a new tale of journalism, investigations, and a deadly airline crash based on real life. Hideo Yokoyama, who reported on the original plane crash, has memorialized in fiction what history has chosen to forget, and brings the same humanism and righteous outrage to the table as in his previous work.
Lars Kepler, The Fire Witness (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
Kepler’s Joona Linna novels, which are worldwide bestsellers, are slowly being released in the U.S. There are six novels in the series and three have been published in America: The Sandman (2017), The Hypnotist (August 2018), and now The Fire Witness. Though the series bears the marks of many of the Scandi noir, Kepler (actually a husband/wife writing team) keeps an almost frenetic pace in his books, seriously ratcheting up suspense and making it hard to stop reading the brief chapters. In Fire Loona is drawn into a gruesome case: the murder of a teenage girl living at a group home.
Jens Lapidus, Top Dog (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
Jens Lapidus is known as the poet of the Oslo Underworld, and his latest has an almost Ellroy-esque scope, with interweaving narratives painting a rich portrait of Stockholm’s underworld. Lawyer Emelie and reformed criminal Teddy once again pair up to investigate the Swedish capital’s secrets, as the criminal underground is turned upside-down in a search for missing drug money.
Hye-young Pyun (transl. Sora Kim-Russell), City of Ash and Red (Arcade Publishing)
Hye-young Pyun won the Shirley Jackson Award for last year’s The Hole, a work described impeccably by the publisher as “Misery meets The Vegetarian” and her new work promises to be just as bizarre. A renowned rat-catcher in a future dystopia is sent to a country to assist in the battle against a mysterious plague, only to return home and discover his wife’s been murdered, and he’s prime suspect. Everything you could hope for in a dystopian thriller!
Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, The Serial Killer (Doubleday)
My Sister, The Serial Killer is looking like one of the year’s most hotly anticipated debuts, a dark, scathing, insidious, and wickedly funny novel about an embittered young woman who has come to realize that her sister—the good child, the one who seems to be so perfect—is actually killing her boyfriends, a fact that solidifies the sisters’ bond, as they need each other to cover up the crimes. The story is at once uproarious, shocking, and packed with emotional poignancy.
