Published by Summit Books / Chicago Review Press, 1991, 608 pages. “[E]ntertainment rules more lives than art and rules them more despotically. People don’t put up their guard when they’re being entertained. The images and the messages slip through and take hold deeper.” Flicker is a thriller, a history of film (with a conspiracy …
Category: Crime / Thriller
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: Olga Tokarczuk
Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-JonesPublished by Fitzcarraldo Press / Thorndike Press, 2019, 274 pages. Original version published in 2009. “[S]ometimes I feel we’re living in a world we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves… And then we spend our whole lives struggling with …
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Tombland: C.J. Sansom
Published by Pan / Mulholland Books / Mantle, 2018, 880 pages. I wasn’t going to write this, since I’ve already reviewed a book in the Shardlake series (Dark Fire). But Tombland is a little different—it is not just a murder mystery but also describes a little-known event in English history. The series centres around Matthew …
Macbeth: Jo Nesbo
Translated from Norwegian by Don BartlettPublished by Hogarth, 2018, 624 pages. Original version published in 2018. A town in Scotland where the sun never breaks through the clouds, pollution hangs heavy, unemployment is high and people are in thrall to a potent drug called the brew, manufactured and sold by the drug lord, Hecate. This …
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle: Stuart Turton
Published by Raven Books / Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018, 544 pages. Stuart Turton takes the traditional English setting for a whodunit—a country house thrumming with secrets, tensions and fears—and turns it into something completely unexpected. I have read a lot of crime fiction, and this is one of the most original books I’ve come across. Take …
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Into the Water: Paula Hawkins
Published by Doubleday / Black Swan, 2017, 448 pages. “There are people who are drawn to water, who retain some vestigial, primal sense of where it flows. I believe I am one of them. I am most alive when I am near the water, when I am near this water.” Nel Abbott was fascinated by …
No sweet song, this
Lullaby by Leila Slimani translated from the French by Sam Taylor Published by Faber & Faber, 2017, 224 pages. Original version published in 2016. Review by Usha Raman I encountered Leila Slimani and her work in the New York Times Review of Books, months before the English translation came to market. My fingers raced across the …
The Long Way Home: Louise Penny
Published by Minotaur Books / Thorndike Press, 2014, 400 pages. “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There's power enough in Heaven to cure a sin-sick soul.” On the surface, this seems like a regular whodunit. But it is more than that—a story about losing and finding yourself, about art and …
Catching Thunder—The True Story of the World’s Longest Sea Chase: Eskil Engdal and Kjetil Sæter
Translated from Norwegian by Diane Oatley.Published by Zed Books, 2018, 400 pages.Review by Susanne Karine Gjønnes This true-life crime novel, Catching Thunder: The Story of the World’s Longest Sea Chase, is the dramatic account of Sea Shepherd’s 110-day long international pursuit of the pirate fishing vessel Thunder. Sea Shepherd is a group of activists committed …
The Eye of Jade: Diane Wei Liang
Published by Picador, 2007, 240 pages. This is a detective story set in Beijing that provides a glimpse into life in modern China with all its contradictions. The central character, Mei, is a private detective. She is approached by a family friend, Uncle Chen, to look for a Han dynasty jade seal. The seal had …
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