Karen Altvegan

Shadow

Detective: None
Location:: Stockholm
Time: Spans 1975 to present
Genre: Scandi Noir


The opening concerns a boy abandoned in a park in 1975. Eventually we come to conclude that he is the adult writer and drifter Kristofer. But what is the connection with the disfuncyional  family of the successful writer and nobel prize winner Ragnerfeldt and the natural death of their former housekeeper at the age of 92?

The puzzles are carefully unravelled. A disturbing read, but one that is compelling

Rating A

Karen Altvegan's website

Linda La Plante

Blind Fury

Detective: DI Anna Travis
Location: London
Time: Current
Genre: British Police Procedural

This is the sixth in the sequence of Anna Travis novels. As her career has developed, Travis is no longer the the "non team player" which has caused her problems, particularly with her superior and on time lover, DCS Langton, although she still stands out as an intuitive detective.

The plot concerns the rape and murder of two young women and a prostitute near a motorway service station and the offer of help frm a life-imprisoned murderer with a degree in psychology. (shades of Hanibal Lecter) A main suspect is identified early on  and although there is a brief period when another character falls into the frame, this is very much a "how are they going to prove it" rather than a "who done it"

The convict offers marginal help but interacts with Travis' personal life with tragic consequences

Rating A

Linda La Plante's web site

Previously read
Above Suspicion
The  Red Dhalia
Clean Cut
The Deadly Intent
The Silent Scream

Aline Templeton

Cold in the Earth

Detective: DI Marjorie Fielding
Location: Galloway, Scotland
Time: Recent Past (Set 2003)
Genre: Scots Noir

This is the first of the DI Fielding Novels. Marjorie Fielding is a Detective Inspector based in a very rural Galloway and whose husband is a sheep farmer. The novel is set against the background of the 2003 foot and mouth epidemic with it's strain on the local community following the necessity to cull herds. It is in the process of disposing of the carcasses of a beef herd that a body is found and a murder investigation is required. 

The case is tied up with the disappearance of the long missing elder sister of an investigative journalist/psychologist who is seeking clues to her fate and the almost simultaneous disappearance of the wife of the owner of cattle farm where the elder sister had been working. The farmer's family is not without its psychological misfits.

The underlying story arc involves DI Fleming's strained relationship with her retired Police sergeant father who doesn't think policing is for women and also the trauma faced by her husband after his heard is culled.

Rating B+

Aline Templeton's Web Site

Previously read
None as yet

Liza Marklund

Last Will


Investgative Journalist: Annika Bengtzon
Location:                     Stockholm, Sweden
Time:                          Present
Genre:                         Scandi Noir

This is the sixth of Marklund's Annika Bengtzon Novels which have followed her career from fist being appointed as a reporter. This plot begins with a murder of a member of a Nobel Prize selection committee by a hired assassin at the annual awards ceremony in front of Bengtzon

As the plot develops there is a questioning of the relationship between the integrity of the Nobel Prizes and the commercial pressures on medical research. A sub plot is developed as a terrorist cell takes credit for the murder and the Swedish Government is too happy top collude with the CIA to allow the rendition of suspect to Jordan.

Although the hired assassin returns to cover her mistakes, this is incidental to the main concern of the plot and the way Bengtzon becomes the target of the killer happens very rapidly at the end as an almost afterthought and is the least satisfactory aspect of an otherwise impressive thriller.

The underlying story ARCs concern 
a) Bengzon's professional development and the integrity of tabloid journalism competing with emerging electronic media 
b) Benggzon's personal life with the stresses on her marriage as she copes with her job, two small children and a husband with his own developing career as a Government adviser working on anti-terrorist legislation and which at one stage leaves hi trying to justify the rendition.

Rating A++ (I read it non stop in a day)

Liza Marklund's web site

Previously read, 
(in chronological but not published order)


Prime Time
The Bomber
Red Wolf

Arni Thorarinsson

Season of the Witch

Investigative Journalist: Einar
Location:                     Akureyi, Iceland
Time :                         Present
Genre:                         Scandi-noir

The protaganist, Einar (no other name given) has been transferred from Reykjavik to the northern town of Akureyi as part of a bid to increase regional sales of his paper covering local issues. The early stages seem as much concerned with his settling in as the development of what will be the main plot.  The story doesn't seem to get going until at least a third of the way in.

It concerns the apparent accidental death of a local businessman's wife and the murder of a student. Eventually the cases converge. Set against the background of an imminent General Election and Iceland's economic problems, there is also underlying concern about the impact of immigrant labour.

This appears to be the only Thorarinson novel traslated into English so far.although there are oher novels translated into other European languages

Rating B

Dana Stabenow

A Cold Blooded Business

Detective/Investigator: Kate Shugak
Location:                     Alaska
Time:                          Recent (mid 1990s)
Genre:

Kate Shugak is a former District Attorney's investigator, inveigled into specific jobs. She is a native Aleut living on a 160 acre holding in Alaska. In this novel she is asked to work undercover to discover who is responsible for drugs trafficing into a large closed industrial zone run by a major oil company. In this novel, the 4th in the series, she stumbles perhaps too fortuitously on the actual villains. Not quite as tight a plot as some of the previous Shugak novels I've read

An underlying concern in the Shugak novels is the status of Aleut and Inuit natives of Alaska, the frequent prejudice against them and their difficulty in coping with the rapid impact of the commercial development of Alaska, particularly the degrading influence of alcohol. The concern for the native Alaskans' disappearing culture lleads to a sub plot about the illegal export of historic ivory artefacts.

Rating B

Dana Stabenow web link

Previously read 
A Cold Day for Murder
A Fatal Thaw
Dead in the Water

Karin Fossum

The Caller

Detective: Konrad Sejer
Location:  Norway
Time:        Present
Genre;      Scandi-Noir

There's something quite different about Fossum's novel, her eighth featuring Konrad Sejer. This is not about a murder and its solution. It's about a maladjusted and negelected young man who vents his discontent on the world through seemingly harmless but still malicious practical jokes such as covering a sleeping baby with animal blood,  posting  a premature death notice for an old lady or sending a mother rushing to a hospital following a false call that her daughter had had a traffic accident. Fossum explores the impact of the hoaxes on the lives of the victims, particularly the parents of the blood covered child.

There is no intentional murder but the hoaxes seem to culminate in the horrific death of a child which may or may not have been the fault of the hoaxer followed quite quickly by the accidental death of the young man's much loved grandfather, as far as the police know at the hands of the hoaxer's drunkard mother. But the reader knows better. 

Eventually the hoaxer meets his fate and only the little girl who has been one of his victims knows the truth.

Rating A

Web site about Karen Fossum

Other Inspector Sejer Books read previously

Don't Look Back (1)
When the Devil Holds (3)