Roseanna, by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

A team of Swedish police detectives are trying to solve a murder. It takes months. They start with no clues. They wait for a break in the case. They stare out the window at the rain. They play endless games of chess. They walk the streets of Stockholm after dark, looking up at people in [...]

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Little Girl Lost, by Richard Aleas

I have to confess, part of my love for libraries came from unsavory habits in my youth.
I spent many hours roaming library shelves in my early teens. Was I looking for the great books? Hardly. For the best and most entertaining genre fiction? Not usually. For great young adult literature? No, that category was just [...]

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Body Movers by Stephanie Bond

For some reason, which I cannot now recall, I was speaking with one of my colleagues about people who clean up crime scenes. Sadly, this has become a business–cleaning up people’s murders and suicides. In the course of the conversation, she mentioned a fiction series called Body Movers, which I decided to try. The first [...]

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Devil May Care, by Sebastian Faulks

Ian Fleming’s star rose when John F. Kennedy casually mentioned that he was reading one of the James Bond books.  Bond burned his way through 14 books, all of which became movies, before Fleming’s death in 1964.  Those movies, which departed the published canon in 1982’s Moonraker, have come to define James Bond’s image, despite [...]

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Death of a Red Heroine, by Qiu Xiaolong

Finally, we end the week with another crime novel set in a totalitarian state. Death of a Red Heroine, by Qiu Xiaolong, takes place in China in the 1990s, just as Deng Xiaoping’s reforms to the Chinese economic system are opening the door to a more market-based economy. While many Chinese welcome these changes, and [...]

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The Coroner’s Lunch, by Colin Cotterill

As a young man, Siri Paiboun left his native Indochina to study medicine in Paris. After joining the Communist Party there in the 1930s because his sweetheart was a committed party member, Siri remained an active if not passionate party functionary for four decades. When the Pathet Lao finally triumphed in the decades-long civil war [...]

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Billy Boyle, by James Benn

If you like your crime fiction written in a fairly straightforward, no-nonsense style, with a lot of action and an appealingly imperfect main character, James Benn’s Billy Boyle series will be a good fit. Billy is a Boston policeman, just having been made a detective, when WWII begins. He is not the brightest star in [...]

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Murder in the Marais, by Cara Black

I had the good fortune while at the American Library Association Conference to spend some time talking to Cara Black, author of the finely written Aimée Leduc mystery series. It is always interesting to get an author’s perspective on her own books as well as on the rest of the field, and Cara suggested some [...]

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Siren of the Waters, by Michael Genelin

Some of the best contemporary crime fiction is being published by small presses. Soho Press is notable for its crime fiction with an international flavor. This week, Blogging for a Good Book looks at five Soho authors who set their stories in Slovakia, France, Laos, Shanghai, and England. All of these titles are in series, [...]

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Tell No One, by Harlan Coben

Today, we hear from Circulation Services staffer Mandy Malone, who offers us thrills and chills for the summer.
I was familiar with the suspense thrillers of author Harlan Coben through my work at the library, but it wasn’t until I saw French director Guillaume Canet’s adaptation of Coben’s 2001 novel Tell No One that I decided [...]

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