More like a fiendish sudoku puzzle than a traditional police procedural, this blockbuster novel, set in Oslo, challenges alcoholic Inspector Harry Hole to find solutions to four cold-blooded murders, which may or may not be related. A “square peg” in the police department, Hole does jot hesitate to do things his own way, often infuriating his peers while still inspiring (sometimes grudging) respect for his honesty. A bank robbery in which a gunman executes his female hostage because the bank manager exceeds twenty-five seconds to fill a bag with money is just the start of the non-stop action. As Harry Hole investigates the similarities between this robbery and the stunning earlier robberies by Raskol Baxhet, a gypsy now incarcerated, the reader is jerked every which-way, his/her perceptions constantly changed as new information emerges about the characters and the past. A terrific mystery.
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Major Max Chadwick is the Information Officer for the British army on Malta during World War II. “Loyal Little Malta,” a British colony strategically located between Sicily and North Africa, has been bombarded non-stop by the Germans and Italians for many months. Though British submarines based on Malta have been interrupting German shipping in the Mediterranean since the war began, the British are almost helpless against the Axis air power. In April, 1941, “the Luftwaffe flew a staggering 9600 sorties against the island, almost double the number for March, which itself had shattered all previous records.” The British have three hardy biplanes–Faith, Hope, and Charity–which have been in the air around the clock in an effort to delude the Italians and Germans into thinking they have more planes than they really do. Virtually all their Spitfires and Hurricanes have been destroyed, many while still parked at the airport, and new planes have not arrived. Then several murders occur to set nerves even more on edge.
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In this heart-thumping experimental novel which bursts the bounds of the usual genre categories, British author David Peace creates an impressionistic story of a real Tokyo bank robbery and the deaths of twelve bank employees on January 26, 1948. A man representing himself as a doctor investigating a case of potentially fatal dysentery in the neighborhood appears at the Shiina-Machi branch of the Teikoku Bank just after closing time. He says he must inoculate all the employees in the bank against this disease, and decontaminate all the documents and money that an infected man may have touched. He explains how he will give each person two different medicines and shows them how to roll up their tongues for the first liquid so that the medicine will not hurt their teeth or gums. After one minute, he gives them all the second liquid. Two minutes after that, sixteen victims, writhing in agony, have fallen unconscious, and twelve of them die, poisoned with cyanide. The physician then removes the day’s receipts and disappears
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In the fourth of the Inspector Erlendur series, Gold Dagger Award-winner Arnaldur Indridasson creates a challenging and thought-provoking mystery by revisiting the political complexities of Iceland during the height of the Cold War in the 1970s and 1980s. At this time, many Icelandic young people were resentful of the US presence and its huge naval air station in Keflavik, accusing the US of “spreading filth.” While the US and NATO were using this base for strategic defense against possible USSR aggression, many students, often from poor families, were accepting the chance to study in East Germany at the University of Leipzig, then returning home with their socialist and communist messages. For Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson, busy solving contemporary crimes, this past history has been unimportant, but when an earthquake leads to the unexpected draining of Lake Kleifarvatn, a skeleton, weighed down with a Russian transmitter, emerges from the depths, a large hole in its skull. With no other evidence available, Erlendur’s only hope of identifying the remains rests with his investigation of missing persons from the late 1970s and 1980s.
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The twenty-four hour train ride from La Paz, Bolivia, to Arica, Chile, through the Andes at an altitude of up to 16,000 feet, from which the railway descends to the sea, provides the “closed room” setting for a murder which takes place in 1952, somewhat akin to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934). The key difference, however, is that the passengers on the Andean Express are, for the most part, local people traveling for a variety of reasons, and not wealthy Europeans traveling for pleasure. Their issues and resentments are local, based on their long histories with the victim, a man so loathsome that few can find anything positive to say about him. “Killing Alderete would not be murder; it would be a settling of accounts,” one remarks.
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