The Redeemer by Jo Nesbø

The Redeemer by Jo Nesbø, translated by Don Bartlett
Originally published as Frelseren, 2005
Knopf, May 2013

FTC Disclosure: I received a review copy from the publisher via Edelweiss.

I really like police procedurals, and I, among millions of others, eat up the Harry Hole novels by Jo Nesbø. Harry is an interesting character, the plots are full of twists, and there’s a lot at stake for the characters. This is probably my favorite Harry Hole book of the four I’ve read so far: Harry isn’t in as horrible place as he’s been in in previous books, the plotting isn’t too convoluted, and the story doesn’t involve a serial killer. I recommend reading the three books that come right before The Redeemer (The Redbreast, Nemesis, and The Devil’s Star) to provide more background about Harry and what’s happening in the police department, but starting with The Redeemer won’t be too confusing to a reader who’s new to the series.

The Redeemer begins with a sober Harry Hole welcoming– if that’s the right word– a new boss, Gunnar Hagen, a former military man who replaces his protective boss Bjarne Møller. This particular investigation centers on the shooting of a Salvation Army member in a busy square in Oslo during a concert before Christmas. The story turns into a cat and mouse game between Harry and The Little Redeemer, a contract killer from the former Yugoslavia. Nesbø is good at switching points of view from the hunter to the hunted, and he’s very good at building suspense. He also spends plenty of time fleshing out the story of The Little Redeemer, which humanizes him.

Besides the suspense of the main criminal investigation, which brings Harry and his colleagues into the world of the Salvation Army’s leadership and the people they serve, the novel spends plenty of time on Harry’s personal life and life within the police department. There are threads that I’m sure will be played out in other novels as his situation in the department evolves.

This is a very strong book in the series, and I recommend it highly.

For other positive reviews of The Redeemer, see Yet Another Crime Fiction Blog, and The Game’s Afoot.

Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seichō Matsumoto

Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seichō Matsumoto, translated by Beth Cary
Originally published as Suna no Utsuwa (Vessel of Sand), 1961
Soho Press, 1989
Source: library copy

Inspector Imanishi works for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, and the first chapters center around the fruitless police investigation into the murder of an unidentified man found in a railway yard. The majority of the book focuses on Imanishi’s solo and off-hours investigation after the official investigation is closed, so the book is just part police procedural and part solo investigation.

This book is very train-centric: the first body is found in a rail yard, Imanishi travels by train to many far-flung locations in search of the killer (the northeast, the shrine of Ise). The book covers a lot of rural towns while Imanishi is based in Tokyo. Besides the urban-rural split, the book focuses on the generational split between Imanishi, who’s 45 and considers himself to be old (!), and his younger police colleague Yoshimura and the Nouveau group, a group of artists and critics in their late twenties who appear throughout the book.

The tone of the book is somewhat detached: I didn’t feel as horrified as I thought I would feel with the mounting numbers of suspicious deaths in the book. Maybe that’s because I had faith in Imanishi’s investigatory abilities. Maybe it’s because I was so focused on picking up on the details about Japan that I don’t come across on a daily basis (various accents, geography during his many train trips, Shintoism). I don’t think this is a book that gets bogged down in the details about Japan and Japanese culture, though. Despite the jacket copy, this is not a brisk thriller with a lot of cliffhangers. Instead, it’s about an investigation that goes in circles but never really felt slow to me. Finally, I think that the cleverness revealed at the end of the book made me appreciate what came before it even more.

I’m glad to have discovered this novel as part of the 2013 Global Reading Challenge because I like to balance out new books with older books. I liked getting a slice of post-war Japan, getting a sense of what was a bestseller in the 1960s in Japan, and digging into how investigations differed technology-wise fifty years ago. Matsumoto was quite prolific, but only a few of the Inspector Imanishi novels have been translated into English.

Other reviews appear in Mrs. Peabody Investigates and Mysteries and More from Saskatchewan.

The Stranger by Camilla Läckberg

The Stranger by Camilla Läckberg, translated by Steven T. Murray
Also published as The Gallows Bird, 2011; originally published as Olycksfågeln, 2006
This edition: Open Road Integrated Media/ Pegasus Books, 2013

Disclosure: I received a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

The Stranger is the fourth Patrik Hedstrom-Erica Falck novel by Läckberg, and it’s the first one I’ve read in this series. Set in a small town in southern Sweden, the novel follows Patrik’s investigation of a single car accident that he suspects was homicide as well as the investigation of the murder of a reality show contestant living in town for five weeks. His fiancee Erica is a true crime writer, but she doesn’t do any writing in this book: she’s in the midst of caring for her sister Anna and planning her wedding.

I’m new to Läckberg, and I didn’t know what to expect. This book is heavy on personal drama in all of the personal lives of its characters, including Patrik’s boss Melberg, and it’s lighter on the mystery. I read it very quickly despite the fact that I didn’t feel a lot of tension mounting in the plot.

There are a couple writing tics that bothered me about this book: Patrik is a perfect police officer (he has a fabulous memory, he gets along with everyone), and Läckberg withholds information from the reader after Patrik gathers it in a phone call, for example. I think she does the latter because there are so many characters to juggle in the story, and the mystery takes a back seat to the investigation to a certain degree. Despite my quibbles with the book, I’m willing to try The Ice Princess to see how it compares to this one.

Other reviews appear in Crime Scraps and Fleur Fisher in her world.

Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo

Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo, translated by Howard Curtis
Originally published as Total Khéops, 1995
Europa Editions, May 2013 (Europa World Noir Series)
Book 1 in the Marseille Trilogy

Disclosure: I received a review copy from the publisher via Edelweiss.

The first book in the Marseille Trilogy, Total Chaos introduces police officer Fabio Montale, a second generation immigrant living in the port city of Marseille who works in the Neighborhood Surveillance Squad where he functions more as a social worker to the young criminals in the projects than as a police officer. Fabio himself had a wayward youth: he and his friends Ugo and Manu committed a number of crimes before Fabio left his friends to join the Foreign Legion and eventually became a police officer. The story begins with one of his old friends commiting murder, and Fabio ends up investigating what happened to his friend as more related murders occur.

Fabio is an outsider cop without much power, which works to his advantage during the investigation that quickly becomes bigger and bigger as the violence increases and as the organized crime squad led by his nemesis, Auch, appears. The plot ends up being pretty convoluted as the book unfolds, but the main gist is that Montale is working in a very dysfunctional, dangerous system and city.

The main plot takes a back seat to a description of Marseille: its neighborhoods, its immigrants, its political problems, its development and redevelopment. This book is very rooted in its place, and it doesn’t shy away from the societal problems that the formerly strong industrial port city is facing. I live in a land-locked state that is far from the Mediterranean port of Marseille, but I do live in the Rust Belt with lots of immigrants from around the world and around the country, and I live with the collapse of the industrial economy, so there are echoes here for me. Finally, this book makes me realize how little I know about the Algerian War.

A few warnings about the book: the violence in this book is quite brutal, the female characters are not very developed, and Izzo’s outlook is pretty damn bleak. Reading the book as a woman in 2013, I’m annoyed by Montale’s relationships with women, especially the hooker with the heart of gold. That being said, I was interested in the book and want to know what happens in the rest of the trilogy. And I wonder if the trilogy as a whole ends as bleakly as this first outing does.

Marina Sofia reviewed the entire Marseille Trilogy in Finding Time to Write.

Blessed Are Those Who Thirst by Anne Holt

Blessed Are Those Who Thirst by Anne Holt, translated by Anne Bruce
Scribner, 2012
Originally published as Salige er de som tørster, 1994
Source: library

Blessed Are Those Who Thirst is a short novel in the Hanne Wilhelmsen series by Anne Holt, and I’m not sure how representative of the series it is. 1222, the first book to be translated into English, is a much later book in the series that’s essentially a locked-room mystery at a ski resort. The first book, Blind Goddess, is a police procedural centering on a murder investigation. Blessed Are Those Who Thirst, on the other hand, centers on a rape investigation as well as a batch of extremely bloody crime scenes where the victims are missing.

It’s a book that’s very amped up: it’s a very hot late spring in Oslo, the police are swamped with lots of violent cases, the bloody crime scenes are dubbed the Saturday night massacres within the department, and there is a very brutal rape of a medical student that is the focus of the novel.

I will admit that sometimes in the course of a police procedural I lose sight of the crime at the center of the novel and become more wrapped up in the chase for the perpetrator, but that didn’t happen while I read this novel. Holt has a lot of sympathy for Kristine, the rape victim, and her father, who are tempted to pursue justice outside the criminal justice system as they search for Kristine’s attacker. The book is a meditation on what justice is– and whether you can get justice by becoming a vigilante.

In terms of its place in the series, the novel advances police attorney Håkon Sand and detective Hanne Wilhelmsen’s personal stories a bit, but since it’s such a short story, it’s just a small bit of the story that will play out more in subsequent installments.

Finally, I want to comment on some of the flourishes that make this book stand out to me. Holt, a former minister of justice, knows bureaucracy. It’s nice to read a police procedural that acknowledges the extremely large workload of public servants and how things fall between the cracks in such a busy system. I don’t expect crime novels to be completely realistic (that wouldn’t be entertaining), but it’s nice to have a dose of reality from time to time. I also appreciated the information about the counsel for the victim and victim compensation systems in Norway, since they are unlike what exist in the U.S..

Sarah at Crimepieces and Norman at Crimescraps have also reviewed this book.

Deadly Harvest by Michael Stanley

Deadly Harvest by Michael Stanley
Bourbon Street Books, April 30, 2013
Detective Kubu book 4

Disclosure: I received a review copy from the publisher via Edelweiss.

So my quest to complete the 2013 Global Reading Challenge now brings me to Africa, specifically Botswana and the fourth Detective Kubu novel by Michael Stanley, the writing team of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip.

Assistant Superintendent David Bengu, known as Kubu, works for the Botswana CID, and in this particular novel he investigates the disappearances of two young girls and the murder of a rising politician. It turns into a story about investigating muti killings, that is, murders done so witch doctors can harvest body parts for their potions. It’s an intractable situation for Kubu and his team: enough people, including the police, believe in the efficacy of witch doctors so they are scared to pursue their murder investigations. It’s a gruesome set-up for a novel, but the novel is not gratuitously violent nor preachy.

Kubu works closely with his boss Mabaku and with new female detective Samantha Khama. The entire police department features prominently in the story: there’s talk of Kubu and Mabaku being promoted, and Kubu runs into issues working on the case because of being stalled by the department.

The tone of this novel is not as outraged as I expected it to be (Khama is the most outraged character), but it definitely has the effect of outraging me even after I’ve read this novel. I think it comes down to the fact that Kubu, Khama, and Mabaku are such principled people who are willing to pursue the investigation despite the pressure not to do so that gives the story a bit of hopefulness.

This novel is dedicated to two human rights activists, Alice Mogwe and Unity Dow, and the authors mention Dow’s book The Screaming of the Innocent in the afterword. I plan on reading it soon.

Just as a sidenote, I haven’t read much African fiction. Besides reading a handful of books from or about Africa in college, I’ve tried The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith and Morituri by Yasmina Khadra but didn’t finish them. I welcome any suggestions for other African crime novels. Deon Meyer is already on my list.

April Reading and Crime Fiction Pick of the Month

It’s finally spring here in the upper Midwest after a somewhat snowy (!) April. The driving force in my reading last month was geographical: I chose books to cover a variety of countries to meet the 2013 Global Reading Challenge, where my goal is to read three books from each continent. For Antarctica I’m substituting novels set in more than one country. I’ve finished over half of the books for that challenge, so I hope to move on to some personal reading challenges as well in the next few months: I’d like to read some classic crime novels and dig deeper into some series that I started since I started blogging. And maybe, just maybe I’ll read something American in the next few months too!

My pick of the month is Misterioso by Arne Dahl: a good plot, a team of investigators in the A-Unit pursuing a killer targeting wealthy capitalists, and plenty of humor.Here’s a brief recap of all the books I reviewed this month:

1. Pale Horses by Jassy Mackenzie- fourth in the Jade de Jong PI series set in South Africa. I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do with Jade’s personal life in this installment, and I’m willing to try the first book in the series, Random Violence to see if I like this book more once I have that background.

2. Misterioso by Arne Dahl- first book in the Intercrime series featuring the A-Unit. I liked the focus on the whole investigative team instead of on just one detective. This book had a great plot and great characters.

3. Food of Ghosts by Marianne Wheelaghan- first in a series featuring Scottish police officer Louisa Townsend who is stationed in the island nation of Kiribati. I liked the background about life on the island a bit more than the actual mystery.

4. Deadly Harvest by Michael Stanley- fourth in the Detective Kubu series set in Botswana. This is written by a duo from South Africa, one of whom lives in Minnesota now. The investigation centers on muti killings, which is a grim subject.

Please visit Mysteries in Paradise for a collection of other crime fiction books of the month.