The leaves are turning red, the air is growing brisk, and the fleeting magic of fall is fully upon us. Summer travel season is over, but we can still travel via books, so let this month’s international crime fiction column take you to France, South Korea, Japan, Argentina, and Russia. Here are five titles that will immerse you fully in the worlds (and underworlds) of other nations.
Joel Dicker, The Enigma of Room 622
Translated by Robert Bononno
(HarperVia)
A new meta-mystery from the Swiss author unfolds with uncanny precision and evolves from a hotel whodunnit into something more nebulous. The elegant surroundings bring to mind classic mysteries, with notes of subversion peppered throughout. –DM
J. M. Lee, Broken Summer
Translated by An Seon Jae
(Amazon Crossing)
In this moody psychological thriller, an artist wakes up one morning to find his wife, who also handled all of the business aspects of his work, has disappeared and left a novel in her place, told from the perspective of an artist’s wife who finds her husband decidedly ungrateful for all that she does for him. –MO
Kaoru Takamura, Lady Joker: Volume Two
Translated by Allison Markin Powell and Marie Iida
(Soho)
I’m a big fan of big novels, and Kaoru Takamura’s Lady Joker is an epic for the ages. The first installment of 500+ pages took us into a fictionalized account of an industrialist’s kidnapping that captivated Japanese media for upwards of two years in the mid-90s. Now, we get to read the impeccably translated followup as Takamura continues to weave together elements of crime, social criticism, and literary epic. I described the first one as James Ellroy if written by Don Delillo, and I stand by that comparison. –MO
Nicolas Ferraro, Cruz
Translated by Mallory N. Craig-Kuhn
(Soho)
A vivid, bloody noir set amidst prison and gangland violence in northern Argentina, where two brothers swear themselves to different paths and wrestle with their father’s violent legacy. –DM
Yulia Yakovleva, Punishment of a Hunter
Translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp
(Pushkin Vertigo)
This is part of a subgenre I like to think of as the “small crime within a larger crime”—a detective investigating a series of murders and art thefts comes up against the rampant corruption and gleeful cullings of Stalinist Russia. The miseries of the 1930s are vividly rendered in Punishment of a Hunter for an unsettling and gripping achievement. –MO
