Daniel Silva’s fourteenth novel featuring Gabriel Allon, an Israeli secret service agent who also works as a restorer of fine art, starts with the gruesome torture murder of a former diplomat to the Middle East, found hanging by his wrists from the chandelier of an estate on Italy’s Lake Como. The victim, suspected of being both a collector and an exporter of stolen paintings from Italy, is well known to General Cesare Ferrari, head of the Art Squad of Italy, and Ferrari knows whom to contact to investigate this case about stolen art, who buys it, and why. Gabriel Allon, who is currently in Venice restoring an altarpiece, made his reputation with the Israeli secret service when he was a young man, when he personally tracked down and executed six Black September terrorists who killed eleven Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics in 1972. Ferrari asks him to help find the murderer of Jack Bradshaw at an estate along Lake Como. Bradshaw is believed to have been a collector of stolen art masterpieces, and he may also have been an exporter of them. The condition of Bradshaw’s body, which bears the marks of extreme torture, lead Ferrari and Allon to speculate that the murderer may have succeeded in gaining whatever information he needs to retrieve and sell the paintings Bradshaw is believed to have in his possession. Allon must follow the money trail, and it points in the direction of the leader of a Middle Eastern country.
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Maurizio de Giovanni, whose Neapolitan noir novels have sold almost a million copies, may be the only author who has ever featured a murder committed with a “snow globe” containing a hula dancer playing a ukulele. Famous primarily for his series of seven noir mysteries set in Naples during the rule of Benito Mussolini and featuring Inspector Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi, de Giovanni has also developed a second series, this one set in contemporary Naples. Following the stand-alone The Crocodile, the most violent and horror-filled of all de Giovanni’s novels, The Bastards of Pizzofalcone, the first in this new series, includes some of the author’s trademark elements of dark humor and irony, missing from The Crocodile. Returning to the character-based novels which made the Ricciardi series so popular, de Giovanni develops a large cast of characters, who may become “regulars” in future novels. These include four “damaged” police officers, the “bastards,” who have been assigned to work in Pizzofalcone, a steep, hilly area to the southwest of central Naples. All have had career problems and must now prove themselves in Pizzofalcone, where a widespread scandal involving police corruption and connections to the Neapolitan Mafia, known as the Camorra, has led to massive dismissals. These new officers will have only a short period of time to prove their worth or they will be dismissed and the Pizzofalcone precinct closed. As they begin to investigate a murder and the possible detention of a young woman against her will, they all begin to learn more about themselves.
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In this second of his “new style” of novels, Norwegian author Jo Nesbo creates a character frantic to escape the Oslo hitmen sent to kill him. Traveling eighteen hundred kilometers in seventy hours of non-stop racing, the character, Ulf, finally reaches the Finnmark Plateau to the far north of Norway. Located well above the Arctic Circle, near the North Pole, Finnmark appears to be the perfect hiding place for Ulf, also known as Jon Hansen. Its enormous land area – larger than the country of Denmark – has only seventy-five-thousand residents – a good place to hide – and with three months of midnight sun, it is not a place where an enemy can sneak up easily in the dark. Like Olav in Blood on Snow, Nesbo’s previous novel, Ulf has become involved with the organized crime ring run by “the Fisherman” in Oslo, and also like Olav, he appears to have a good heart beneath his hard exterior – a young man sucked into being “fixer” for a big-time criminal by circumstances over which he believes he had no control. His fifteen years of schooling, including two years of university, never prepared him for the kind of absolute choice he had to make when, in desperate need of a large sum of money, he connected with the Fisherman as the only way to save a life. Now, on the run because he did not fulfill a contract killing, Ulf has arrived in tiny Kasund, near Kautokeino, home to fishermen, reindeer herders, and the aboriginal Sami culture.
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A middle-aged author who climbs a tree with her suitcase and then stays there is not a typical protagonist, nor is she even typical of the people we come to know within this novel as it develops. Beatriz Yagoda, sitting in her tree in the south of Rio, is a successful, middle-aged novelist of “peculiar” stories, and she does not sit in the tree for very long. That night she disappears, and five days after that, her translator, Emma Neufeld, living in Pittsburgh, receives an e-mail from a stranger asking if she is aware that the woman for whom she has translated two novels is now missing in Brazil. What evolves, while technically a mystery story, has elements of many different genres, as is befitting a novel about writing. Here author Idra Novey asks how much from an author’s real life migrates onto the printed page; about what, if anything, a careful reader may learn about an author’s inner life and thoughts from studying what s/he says in a novel; and about how much a translator can truly reflect an author’s inner essence. Within this debut novel, author Idra Novey, who is also a translator of novels in Portuguese and Spanish, also brings the whole question of a translator’s role to the forefront. Novey keeps the novel from becoming top-heavy with “philosophizing” by including elements of humor, violence, mystery, and the silliness of newspaper gossip columns, and when another young writer climbs into a banyan tree in the Jardim de Ala, and is later found dead and castrated, the newspaper offers only this advice: “All you other authors out there in Rio, please, please stay out of the trees!”
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WINNER of the 2015 Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of 2015. Icelandic author Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s prize-winning noir thriller features several murders, all of which take place aboard a large yacht which has been traveling from Portugal to its base in Reykjavik during a gale. This “locked boat” mystery, similar to the “locked room” mysteries pioneered by Edgar Allen Poe and Wilkie Collins, involves characters “locked” in a place from which they cannot escape, and when a murder takes place, both the victim and the killer are among the characters known to each other and to the reader. The author provides hints and clues throughout as the murders take place, encouraging the reader to become emotionally involved in the search for the killer, as possible motivations for murder are discovered for virtually all the characters. Sigurdardottir takes this a step further, keeping her murderer and her suspects on the “locked boat,” while adding an investigator on shore, after the fact – Thora Gudmundsdottir, a lawyer/sleuth who has been hired at the behest of a devastated family.
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