March brings a host of excellent new international thrillers, including several from Japan (an always well-represented nation in this column), plus two from France and one from Algeria. As always, all blurbs are by yours truly unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for reading my little column, and imagining a wider world.
Uketsu, Strange Buildings
Translated by Jim Rion
(HarperVia)
Uketsu is back, this time with a collection of loosely linked stories set in a variety of bizarre structures. Just as in Strange Houses, each tale includes floor plans and plenty of clues for the fair play crowd, who can solve each mystery along with Uketsu’s narrator and piece together the wider connections between stories, while those who prefer to wait for the denouement will find much reward in the novel’s final pages. Also, I have no idea why all best face-hiders write horror, but I would love to see Uketsu and Chuck Tingle do a collab, just for the author photos alone…
Antoine Volodine, The Monroe Girls
Translated by Alyson Waters
In this postmodern masquerade of a mystery, the titular Monroe girls are trained assassins from a shadow realm, made into weapons by a murdered revolutionary, and sent to a post-apocalyptic Paris to carry out their metafictional agenda. They are observed by an aging member of a vanished party, determined to obfuscate the location of his targets in the face of harsh interrogation by his former masters, for what might be the strangest work of espionage fiction ever crafted. Fans of China Mieville’s The City and the City and John le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy will find much to appreciate within Volodine’s work as a whole, and The Monroe Girls in particular.
Mieko Kawakami, Sisters in Yellow
Translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio
(Knopf)
Mieko Kawakami wowed the literary world with her critically acclaimed Breasts and Eggs, and now with Sisters in Yellow she proves the same skill and versatility within the crime genre. In what I already predict as one of the best crime novels of the decade, a group of young women fall under the charismatic influence of a flighty scammer and fall deeper and deeper into the trap of criminalized poverty. Epic, brutal, and stunning, Sisters in Yellow scratches the same itch as Lady Joker, Out, and the film Shoplifters.
Marceau Miller, The Story of Marceau Miller
Translated by Howard Curtis
(Blackstone)
A mysterious text, from an even more mysterious writer! Marceau Miller is the pseudonym of a Swiss screenwriter and the name of the titular character’s manuscript, discovered by his widow in the wake of his sudden and inexplicable demise. Fans of metafiction, especially the novel The Harry Quebert Affair, should find much to appreciate.
Saïd Khatibi, The End of the Sahara
Translated by Alexander E. Elinson
(Bitter Lemon Press)
The End of the Sahara is the second novel on this list to take place in Algeria during the tumultuous late 1980s. At the Khatibi’s moody masterpiece, a nightclub singer has been found murdered, perplexing a wide range of lovers, friends, enemies, and others drawn into her magnetic orbit, and in possession of her deadly secrets. Evocative, brooding, and perfectly hard-boiled!
Asako Yuzuki, Hooked : A Novel of Obsession
Translated by Polly Barton
(Ecco)
I loved Asako Yuzuki’s searing social critique of a serial killer novel, Butter, and Hooked continues to showcase the author’s talent for skewering societal norms and everyday pretensions. In this cat-and-mouse thriller, a lonely career woman obsessed with a free-spirited “wife blog” sets out to befriend the site’s lackadaisical author, with predictably disastrous results. I, however, would not mind running into an obsessed CrimeReads fan, and if anyone’s reading this wondering where to casually bump into me at a sushi spot: check out Ichiumi’s happy hour, Monday through Thursday, 2:30-4 PM. And definitely check out the negihama roll. They do it up.
