Armchair travelers have been blessed with incredible variety this month, including new works from international powerhouses Oliver Pötzsch and Arturo Pérez-Reverte, as well as rising talents Amara Lakhous and Maude Royer. Below, you’ll find stories to fit (almost) every taste, including a Grecian locked room mystery, a Viennese whodunnit, an Algerian political thriller, and a Quebecois horror novel. Enjoy!
Oliver Pötzsch, The Girl and the Gravedigger
Translated by Lisa Reinhardt
(HarperVia)
I’m a big fan of Pötzsch’s Hangman’s Daughter series, in which the titular heroine faces a variety of historically appropriate perils in 17th century Regensberg, so I was psyched to dive into his newly translated series set in 1890s Vienna and find just as much detailed derring-do. In this second in the series (which reads quite easily as a standalone adventure), a renowned Egyptologist is found mummified in a museum vault, and it’s up to a crotchety gravedigger and a budding forensics expert to track down the killer and put all rumors of ancient curses to rest.
Amara Lakhous, The Fertility of Evil
Translated by Alexander E. Elinson
(Other Press)
Decades after the Algerian Revolution, someone starts picking off the former freedom fighters of a 60s-era revolutionary cell, and it’s up to one world-weary detective in the city of Oran (once made famous through the work of Camus) to piece the sad tale together. The Fertility of Evil already looks to be one of the best historical novels of the year, for a story that looks back on the past not to re-litigate, but to understand.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Final Problem
Translated by Francis Riddle
(Mulholland)
Acting as a detective doesn’t make you into a detective, but what if you play a detective for, say, decades? And that detective is Sherlock Holmes? And then you are trapped on a Greek island during a 100-year storm and a dead body pops up and you might as well try to solve the crime, just to get everyone off your back so you can go back to playing chess with the pulp fiction writer who’s been helping with the investigation. That’s the premise of Arturo Perez-Reverte’s brilliant, sly, and entirely reverential metamystery, set in 1960 and featuring the ultimate test of acting: solving as crime as your character. The Final Problem is, in short, the ultimate loving ode to Golden Age detective fiction, made all the more remarkable for its place among the competition.
Maude Royer, The Bloody Brick Road
Translated by Rachel E. Fox
(Gallery)
This one is not for the faint of heart (or stomach). In what the publisher describes as a “funhouse mirror” version of the Wizard of Oz, The Bloody Brick Road begins in 1994 Quebec, where a pregnant young woman loses her job, her boyfriend, her support network, and soon thereafter, her baby; she embarks on a long journey of revenge spanning a quarter century and full of all the tidbits a fan of the original tale could hope for. Nasty and so, so good.
