Not long after a German student is found brutally murdered in Reykjavik’s university, a suspect is arrested. Soon afterwards, lawyer Thora Gudmundsdottir receives a phone call from Matthew Reich, a German acting on behalf of the dead student’s family; they don’t believe that the drug dealer charged with Harald’s murder is the killer and they’d like Thora, who has been recommended to them because she studied in Germany, to help with a private investigation into Harald’s death. It soon becomes apparent that Harald led a less than conventional lifestyle; his post mortem reveals that he underwent several dramatic procedures to change his appearance, and the valuable pieces of art on the walls of his flat point to a morbid fascination with a thoroughly unpleasant subject.

Scandinavian crime fiction, Yrsa Sigurdardottir

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‘What was Lost’ by Catherine O’Flynn is an interesting but unusual novel. It was the sort of book that was very easy to read but I couldn’t work out exactly where it was going and how all the different pieces fitted together until the very end. At that point I realised that I had enjoyed it very much and felt that it had been an immensely satisfying and moving book.

‘What was Lost’ could be described as a twenty-first century mystery, set in a large and somewhat impersonal shopping centre where a small girl went missing twenty years before.

Catherine O’Flynn

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The man bent over. ‘Shhhh,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘You don’t want to wake up just yet…’

As the summer temperature in Atlanta soars, the residents have more to fear than just heat exhaustion. For the last three years when the summer temperature creeps up to a hundred, a vicious killer has emerged and taken two young girls. When the body of the first girl is found, it contains clues to lead detectives to the second victim. If the second girl is discovered quickly enough, then there is a chance she will be found alive. However the clock is ticking…

Lisa Gardner

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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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When teenager Jennifer Maidment is murdered and her mutilated body is found dumped by the roadside near Worcester, West Mercia Police have little to go on and call in the support of criminal profiler, Tony Hill. Hill has time on his hands since back in Bradfield – the Sheffield/Bradford fictional location where Hill lives and usually plies his trade – his friend and lodger, policewoman Carol Jordan has been banned from using Hill’s services. Hill has other personal reasons for thinking that an excuse to go to Worcester is very timely too.

When a teen-aged boy goes missing on Carol’s patch, it’s only a matter of time before his mutilated body will be found and another boy will be reported missing. With Tony in Worcester and Carol banned from talking to him, neither knows that the other is involved with a similar case.

Val McDermid

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“The Keeper of Secrets” is as a Regency novel with a difference. In this book, Judith Cutler has successfully combined the dark world of crime writing with an era that we perceive as being almost universally polite, delicate and graceful. The Regency period is, after all, the world that Jane Austen inhabited. The result is an unusual novel that is an interesting combination of historical mystery and social comment that shows the bleaker side of this undoubtedly elegant period.

It is 1810, and the rural backwaters of Moreton St Jude, Warwickshire, are about to get a rude awakening in the form of the new parson, Tobias Campion. Young and freshly out of Cambridge University, Tobias marks himself as very different from previous incumbents on his first night in the village, standing up for housemaid Lizzie Woodman’s honour when a drunken guest of local aristocrat Lady Elham (“a distant but generous cousin of my mother”) attempts to molest her.

Judith Cutler, Regency period

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