Denis Johnson returns with a novella Train Dreams (FSG, 116p), which tells the story of Robert Grainier, who lived his life in Idaho and the Pacific Northwest from the late 19th century until 1968. A fine piece of tight writing that covers Grainer's experience as a lumberjack, train hand and a hauler of goods and his life after a fire takes his life and small daughter.
George Pelecanos The Cut (Little Brown,292p). The Producer and writer for The Wire,Pelecanos now is hyped when there is no need. The best writer about non-political Washington,the best for political Washington in my mind is still Ward Just. No,the new character Spero Lucas is not his greatest creation yet but he is a good one. Spero Lucas comes home from Iraq and embarks on a career as an investigator for a Washington lawyer. Lucas is hired by a convicted drug smuggler and dealer who wants to know who has been stealing his supplies, which are FEDEX to random addresses in D.C. If you live here, the kick from Pelcanos is realizing that the character throws the knife he used to commit murder away in the yard of the school where my wife worked. Pelecanos takes you to the neighborhoods of D.C. seldom visited or written about by our local reporters.
Kjell Eriksson The Hand That Trembles (Minataur,310pages). I am a junkie for Nordic crime novels and now that Henning Mankell cruelly did away with Wallander I have to survive somehow. An up and coming country commissioner, a hero of the labor movement, Sven-Arne Persson walks out of a meeting and disappears for years, leaving his wife behind. Meanwhile,Eriksson's main character Ann Lindell is stuck trying to solve a mystery of how a female foot ends up on a lonely peninsula inhabited by single men and a woman artist. Sven is seen in India, where he cares for an arboretum, and finally he panics and returns home when he hears news of his wife's death. He confesses to killing a major industrialist, who was thought to be a Nazi war criminal. But it all ties together.
Fred Vargas'
An Uncertain Place (Harvill-Secker,408p). Commissaire Adamsberg travels to a European crime meeting at Scotland Yard and visits Highgate Cemetary, where a pile of shoes with feet inside are found. He returns home to be confronted by a brutal slaying in a suburb of Paris. What starts as a normal Adamsberg mystery, with all its seeming illogic, actually becomes a mesmerizing read and ends up in a Serbian town haunted by memories of a legendary vampire. The play throughout the book is between the Gallic rationalism and the glimmers of the supernatural.
Karen Fossum Bad Intentions (Houghton Mifflin,213p). Norwegian writer Fossum brings back Inspector Sejer in a well-plotted mystery about the drowning death of a local boy who had suffered a nervous breakdown but seemed on the road to recovery and the mysterious killing of a Vietnamese boy.
Yrsa Sigurdardottir The Day Is Dark (Hodder and Stoughton,421). A scientific party goes missing at a mining facility in Greenland and our woman lawyer heroine decides to take on the work of assessing the risks and liabilities of an Icelandic company. The mystery combines high-tech computer clues with Inuit beliefs about past happenings at the mining site. It really is a fantastic read--better to read now before climate change ends the Greenland of the book. All the Icelandic names are here in their glory. Her best mystery to date.
Arne Dahl Mysterioso (Pantheon, 340p). Detective Paul Hjelm successfully ends a hostage situation at a bank but ends up facing an investigation by Internal Affairs. But he is rescued from the end of his career and made part of en elite task force to investigate a killer targeting Sweden's leading industrialists. The novel looks at a Sweden active in the global economy and linked to the Russia mafia as well as the deep-rooted xenophobia occuring with new immigrants. The victims are executed with two bullets and the murderer then listens to a rare bootleg recording of Thelonious Monk's classic "Misterioso". It's the journey of the investigation and the portrait of Sweden's super-rich and their lifestyles that provides the entertainment.
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