Student, 23, missing in Munich Munich (LR)—The Munich police are searching for clues relating to the whereabouts of Lena Beck, 23, from Munich-Haidhausen. According to eyewitnesses, the student was at a party on Tuesday night in the Maxvorstadt district until around 5 a.m. On the way home she telephoned a friend. Her cell phone has…
Too Close to the Edge by Pascal Garnier is a tale of retirement and calm domesticity, with a hint of menace about to explode (Available in ebook format today, and in paperback on June 14, 2016). I’ve written about Pascal Garnier here before, so I am going to skip right past any kind of overview…
Boxes by Pascal Garnier is a work of noir fiction about a French man who goes through with moving to the countryside despite his wife's sudden overseas disappearance (available May 18, 2015). The house was sulking. Not one window would look him in the face. Those dazzling lines from Pascal Garnier’s novel Boxes are enough…
Black Skies by Arnaldur Indridason, translated by Victoria Cribb, is the eighth in the Inspector Erlandur procedural series set in Iceland (available September 17, 2013). Sigurdur Óli is a policeman with a lot of problems. The personal ones pile up with a bleakness and harshness which easily match the tough Icelandic backdrop of Arnaldur Indridason’s…
Strange Bird by Anna Jansson, set in Sweden on the island of Gotland, is Book One of the fourteen books in the Maria Wern series, translated into English by Paul Norlen (available September 17, 2013.) Something deadly has landed on Gotland. Ruben Nilsson raises homing pigeons and has been preparing for an upcoming race when…
Snow White Must Die by Nele Neuhaus is the fourth in the Oliver von Bodenstein and Pia Kirchhoff series (available January 15, 2013). Secrets. A small town holds many secrets. When 30-year-old Tobias (Tobi) Sartorius returns to his small hometown after serving a ten-year prison term for double murder, those secrets start to fester and…
The Russian Donation by Christoph Spielberg, Dr. Felix Hoffmann’s first case, won the 2002 Friedrich Glauser Prize for best first German-language crime novel (available in English January 22, 2013). Why would a reasonably happy, successful doctor be compelled to investigate the unremarkable death of a former indigent patient? Good question, but in The Russian Donation,…
The 7th Woman by Frédérique Molay is a thriller featuring Chief Inspector Nico Sirsky of Paris’s top criminal investigation unit (available for the first time in English on October 23, 2012). A cover blurb on this book compares it to the movie Seven, which is very apt. This book has the same kind of tension…
Death in Breslau by Marek Krajewski is the first novel in the Eberhard Mock Quartet of noir police procedurals originally published in Polish (available September 4, 2012). Even in the bright sun and sweltering heat of July, Breslau is a dark, cold place. Suspicion runs high, and with good reason: everyone has something to hide,…
Now that Contraband, based on the Icelandic film Reykjavík-Rotterdam and with a screenplay by crime novelist Arnaldur Indridason (Indriðason), has hit box-office gold, how long before the next American thriller based on an Icelandic film is announced? Apparently not long at all. Word is the 2011 low-budget Icelandic film Borgríki (City State) will be given…
