The fraught events in the Balkans leading to the occupation of Greece by the Nazis in April, 1941, form the structure of this complex novel, which begins in Greece and ranges through Albania, France, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Turkey, as small, vulnerable Eastern European countries try to stave off both the Italians and the Nazis. Alan Furst, famous for his carefully researched espionage thrillers focusing on events from 1940 and 1941, recreates the confusions and the complications of the Balkan countries in early 1941, as they try to maintain some semblance of sovereignty against the massive war machine of Nazi Germany. Forty-year-old Costa Zannis, a senior police official in the northern Greek city of Salonika, is in the middle of the conflict. Zannis walks a tightrope, doing his part to aid people in Germany who have risked their lives to save others. His life becomes even more complicated, however, by his suddenly developed attraction to the wife of one of Greece’s wealthiest men.
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An unnamed writer is hired by a friend who works with the human rights office of the Catholic Church of an unnamed country to edit and proofread eleven hundred pages of testimony—“the memories of the hundreds of survivors of and witnesses to the massacres perpetrated in the throes of the so-called armed conflict between the army and the guerrillas.” During the 1970s and 1980s, the army declared that the indigenous Indians who had lived in remote Mayan villages for hundreds of years were anti-government leftists, and soldiers conducted widespread genocide wiping out hundreds of villages and killing over a hundred thousand people. Now, many years later, the human rights office at the cathedral plans to publish the survivors’ testimonies for the first time. Castellanos Moya creates a powerful work of fiction from some of the western hemisphere’s most horrendous brutality, giving enough detail to shock the reader into questioning how human beings could not only commit some of these atrocities but enjoy the bloodshed in the process. At the same time, however, he is aware of the limits on violence that a reader can comprehend before “tuning out,” a rare quality which he exploits by juxtaposing some of the worst details of torture against images of the absurdities in the speaker’s personal life.
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Author “James Church,” a career diplomat with years of experience in Asia, including, one assumes, North Korea, sets his second mystery starring Inspector O of the Ministry of People’s Security, in the country’s capital of Pyongyang. Though O is an Inspector, he, like those he works with, has no idea who is really in charge of the investigations to which he is assigned. For Inspector O, the best approach has always been to keep his head down, do what he is told, try to laugh at the absurdities, and close his eyes to the atrocities. Hidden Moon continues the story of O’s life after The Corpse in the Koryo, and readers who have read that novel will have a decided advantage as they read this one. A shocking robbery at the Gold Star Bank, the first ever in Pyongyang, challenges the Ministry and Inspector O, especially since O is not called to deal with it until a week after it has happened.
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French Grand Prix de Litterature Policier (2008) but also winner of the People’s Literature Award and the Author of the Year Award in Sweden. She is second only to Stieg Larsson in sales in Sweden and is the sixth most popular author in Europe. Her unique style and sense of plot have made her an international standout, and this book, the first of her seven novels to released in the United States, has already been translated into twenty five languages. The Ice Princess begins ominously with an unnamed person finding the body of a woman in a filled bathtub in a house so cold that ice has formed around her. Her wrists are slashed in an apparent suicide, but despite the gory scene and the rivers of frozen blood, a mysterious visitor believes that “his love for her had never been stronger.” This is a sophisticated and carefully conceived mystery which will delight those whose interests lean toward the inner worlds of the characters rather than their willingness to take up the sword.
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When the obnoxious Sean Rafferty, a twenty-six-year-old “pasty-face” with a link to drug gangs, is murdered, his aunt Gina, a young businesswoman, is shocked, and hastens to console her much older sister Catherine, Sean’s mother. Within twenty-four hours, her uncle, also named Sean Rafferty and someone to whom she has always felt close, dies in what is assumed to be a driving accident. The younger Sean worked for Terry “the Electrician” Stack, a man linked to drug suppliers operating out of the Netherlands, but there were no gang wars going on. The elder Sean Rafferty was a partner in BCM, a structural engineering firm involved in the Richmond Plaza development. BCM was hired to work with Paddy Norton, chairman of Winterland Properties, the developers of Richmond Plaza, and with Martin “Fitz” Fitzpatrick, his security expert. Before long, the reader, like Gina, suspects that there was an error, and that the wrong Sean Rafferty may have been killed first. (On my Favorites List for 2010)
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