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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The second film from the Millenium Trilogy of novels by Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire, like its predecessor, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, hews closely to the plot line of the novel. Without any introduction, the life story of Lisbeth Salander continues where it left off, as she tries to navigate a world which damaged her to the point that she has difficulty relating to all humans. This film features the same cast in the lead roles as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo though both the director and the cinematographers have changed. Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a computer hacker extraordinaire, has returned from a year of traveling the world, during which time Mikael Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist), publisher of Millenium magazine, moved on with his life. Like the book, this film is Lisbeth’s story, and as her background unfolds, the reader comes to know how and why she was institutionalized and why she is so damaged.
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From the outset of this atmospheric, often nail-biting, story, the reader knows that s/he is in the hands of a mastercraftsman, a writer at the peak of her powers who is able to involve the reader in a story of escalating tension and heart-quickening suspense. After only one page, I was completely caught up in the action, holding on for dear life and “riding the dragon” as Miyabe introduced her unusual characters and their even more unusual problems. Shogo Kosaka, an investigative reporter at Arrow magazine, is driving through a typhoon late at night, nearly blinded by the rain, when he almost strikes a small, teenaged boy, huddled next to his bicycle on the side of the road. When the police suggest that Shogo and Shinji take refuge in a nearby all-night restaurant and small inn, Shogo takes their advice. He becomes unnerved when Shinji tells him the name of the cat belonging to a missing child, the name of the man at the front desk, and personal information about the desk clerk’s relationship with the waitress, things he should have no way of knowing. Later Shinji confides the truth–that he is different, “open,” and he can “scan” people to know what they are thinking.
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