During the Second World War, four Norwegians set sail in a small fishing boat from the Shetlands Islands to the far north of Norway. They’ve been training in Britain to perform acts of sabotage against the Nazis who are occupying their homeland. As they try to make dry land, their arrival comes to the attention of a German gunship and in the ensuing skirmish, only one of their number, Jan Baalsrud, manages to escape. “We Die Alone” is the story of his miraculous and dramatic escape to neutral Sweden which he achieved with the aid of a complex and widespread network of brave and patriotic Norwegians who risked their lives to save one man they had never met before (and some never actually met him at all even though they played important parts in the operation).

David Howarth

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Yashim, a eunuch formerly attached to the Sultan’s palace in Istanbul (as a eunuch not the only thing he was formerly attached to!), is summoned by the Sultan to look into the mysterious death of a guardsman whose remains are found in a huge cauldron. One death soon becomes two and before long Yashim finds himself at the heart of something very suspicious. With the help of Stainslav Palewski the bumbling Polish ambassador and Preen – a high class hooker for want of a better description, Yashim tries to find the culprit before another murder is committed and in doing so unearths a twenty-year grievance….

Set in Ottoman Istanbul in the 1830s, I suppose one would class “The Janissary Tree” as a historical detective novel. The attention to detail and the authenticity seems hard to fault and knowing that the author Jason Goodwin is an expert on things Ottoman ought to persuade the reader that things are correct.

Jason Goodwin

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Things have come a long way since Agatha Christie took crime fiction fans on the Orient Express and to the banks of the River Nile and the genre is now one of the most popular around. There’s a wealth of excellent crime fiction available in translation and in English, and the best authors manage to convey a sense of place as well as telling exciting, well crafted stories. If you’re looking for some ideas on what to pack this summer, look no further. I have some suggestions to take you around Europe.

crime fiction, Europe

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When the two men washed up on the Swedish coast in a life raft turn out to be Latvians, Inspector Kurt Wallander hopes it will be a simple matter of passing the investigation over to Major Liepa, his Latvian counterpart asked to come to help with the case. However, when Major Liepa is found murdered shortly after his return to the Latvian capital, Riga, Wallander finds himself packing a bag and crossing the Baltic to assist with the investigations because the Latvian police believe that Liepa’s death may be linked to the case he had been working on in Sweden.

“The Dogs of Riga” takes a profound turn from ordinary police procedural to international thriller that may disappoint some readers. The book is the second of Henning Mankell’s series of novels featuring the lugubrious – some might say thoroughly miserable – Kurt Wallander.

Henning Mankell, Scandinavian crime fiction

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The night after a party which culminated in an argument with her husband, Per, in front of their friends, the body of Helena and that of her dog, are found butchered on a beach on the Swedish island of Gotland. When Per’s fingerprints are found on the murder weapon the prosecutor instructs Inspector Anders Knutas to charge Per with killing his wife. But the Inspector is not entirely convinced and is proven right to have his doubts what appears to be a second victim of the same killer is found.

When the first body is found, Stockholm-based news journalist Johan Berg receives a tip off phone call from someone who has been supplying him with useful information for years.

Mari Jungstedt, Scandinavian crime fiction

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A huge explosion rocks the city of Seville, destroying an apartment block and a nursery school, in a residential area of the city. Detective Inspector Javier Falcon is charged with determining the cause of the explosion but when it comes to light that there was a mosque in the basement of the building, he learns that the anti terrorism police are running a parallel investigation. Predictably, the two investigations come into conflict with the specialist forces refusing to show everything they know with their civil counterparts. Were the men killed in the mosque caught by their own bomb, or are they victims of a hate campaign by people hoping to fuel the post 9/11 tension between Spaniards and North Africans in the city?

Robert Wilson, Spain

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Commissario Guido Brunetti is woken early one morning and summoned to the scene of a mysterious death; the body of a young man has been found floating in a canal, apparently dead from a severe stab wound. The victim is soon identified as an American public health inspector based at a military base in Vicenza but Brunetti’s boss is reluctant to let the Commissario travel to the base to make enquiries; he would rather ascribe the death to a drugs related crime because he fears that to do otherwise might have implications for the tourist industry in Venice.

Donna Leon

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Bunny Malone is, quite simply, a sex-mad cosmetics salesman who, when his long-suffering wife commits suicide, embarks on a road trip (albeit through suburban East Sussex) with his precocious, and at the same time naive, son, Bunny Jnr.

The lead character couldn’t be more aptly named: Bunny senior gets it on with the women of suburbia – the teenage mothers, the bored housewives, the hollow-eyed heroin-hungry prostitutes – while his son sits (sometimes) patiently in the car, reading his encyclopaedia and memorising the capitals of every nation on earth.

Perhaps because he is more of a caricature than a real person, Bunny manages to maintain a degree of likeability in spite of his undeniable awfulness.

Nick Cave

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Although it’s a few years after the end of the Great War, life in Clivedon Hall Gardens is still dominated by it. Thirty year old Evelyn Gifford is a pioneering young woman, following in the footsteps of her brother, James, whose promising career as a lawyer was cruelly cut short when he was killed in action. After the war, their father had reluctantly paid for Evelyn to go to Cambridge to study law but had not survived long enough to see her find – after a long battle – a post as an articled clerk to the free thinking lawyer, Daniel Breen, himself an outsider in the legal world because he had not come from the two major universities. When Mr Gifford dies his widow learns that his financial affairs are in bad shape.

Katharine McMahon

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“‘A Dante’s Inferno’ for the MTV generation” – Bono’s verdict on Bill Carter’s “Fools Rush In“. Not much of a recommendation for me; sounds like a load of pompous rubbish. For years my opinion of Bono has swayed from ‘short-arsed rock singer’ to ‘head up his own arse rock singer’ but for one positive interlude somewhere in the middle. This respite (for which Bono no doubt thanks me profusely!) is the subject of “Fools Rush In”.

When American Bill Carter found himself needing some excitement he managed to get himself a place on one of the volunteer aid convoys taking food and medical relief into the besieged town of Sarajevo during the bitter war in the former Yugoslavia.

Bill Carter, Sarajevo, Yugoslavia

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Thanks heavens for Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer for, without the things that today make the world an easier place to know, she managed to tell the people of the mid nineteenth century all they needed to know about life as it is lived in all four corners of the world. Over three volumes, Mrs Mortimer provided a succinct, if blunt, guide to the peoples of Europe, Asia, Australia, the Americas and Africa. Those three volumes have been condensed into the single book reviewed here.

She starts with Europe asking first “What is the character of the English?”

“They are not very pleasant company because they do not like strangers, nor taking much trouble…They are often in low spirits, and are apt to grumble, and to wish they were richer than they are, and to speak against the rulers of the land. Yet they might be the happiest people in the world; for there is no country in which there are so many bibles.”

Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer, Todd Pruzan

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