Daughter of Ashes is the third volume of a trilogy by Italian crime \writer Ilaria Tuti, featuring detective Teresa Battaglia, who is suffering from bokth diabetes and the early stages of age-related dementia. The novels are set in and arouond Udine in the far north of Italy, frequently in mountainous areas, and her young and devoted assistant is a prominent feature, along with her other detectives, also devoted to herm and an increasingly hostile boss (I won't go into any details about the boss,m since their back \story is a big part of the novels' development. All the Battaglia books ..read more

 John McFetridge is  a Canadian crime fiction writer who published a couple of excellent series set in Toronto (more noir) and Montreal (more police procedural) a few years ago. Quite by accident I recently discovered that since then he has published a stand-alone (maybe?)novel, Every City is Every Other City, set in contemporary Toronto. The title comes from the main character's everyday profession as a scout for locations for movies and TV shows filmed in Toronto (in which the Canadian city and surroundings serves as whatever city or town that the given project is supposed to tak ..read more

 In Italy, if you want to wish someone luck before an exam or other stressful event, you might use a phrase that translates literally as "in the mouth of the wolf." The appropriate response translates literally as "may the wolf die." In Elizabeth Heider's new crime novel May the Wolf Die, she makes no reference to this common use of the phrase. Instead, she portrays a number of more literal, but human, wolves: predators who attack women, ordinary citizens, and anyone who gets in their way. The novel is set in contamporary Naples, so some (but not all) of the wolves are associated with the ..read more

 Chloe Lane's narrator, Georgie, tells a dark and frequently funny story that progresses in a spiral rather than a straight line. Her language, in Lane's novel Arms & Legs, gathers together a corpse in the Florida forest, exploding eggs, cops and creepy neighbors, controlled burns, and love and desire (not. necessarily at the same time), difficult relationships, and most of all the voice of Georgie, brutally honest with herself and yet open to hose strange creatures, other people.  Georgie is an instructor in a north-central Florida university that sounds a lot like the Universit ..read more

Stuart Neville's writing career began with a sort of political ghost story, Te Ghosts of Belfast, and since then his work has gone from crime fiction to horror, sometimes emphasizing one genre's conventions and sometimes another. In his new Blood Like Mine, he lures a reader in with a character-driven crime story, a mother and daughter on the run, and then shifts suddenly into a high energy horror story still character driven, making the conventions of (spoiler alert) the vampire and zombie tale toward something new. His monster is an original take on the monster as icon, increasing in intensi ..read more

Ayesha Manazir iddiqi: The Centre (Gillian Flynn Books)   Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s The Centre is a thriller, a horror story, and a satire, but above all else an investigation of the relationahip of selfhood and language. The horror element comes not from an alien or supernatural source, but from the depths of human nature, with a reference not to technology but to anthropology and human history, myth, and ritual. Siddiqi’s novel occupies the fraught line between fascination and disgust, between the satiric and the gruesome. Siddiqi, like some other writers working in or adjacent to the ..read more

 William McIlvanney's three novels featuring detective Jack Laidlaw.Laidlaw (1977), The Papers of Tony Veitch (1981), an Strange Loyalties (1991) are not only the foundation of Tartan Noir but distinctive and atmospheric additions to the crime novel as a genre. McIlvanney died in 2015, left an unfinished Laidlaw novel, a prequel to the earlier trilogy, and Ian Rankin (the other most prominent Scottish crime writer) has now finished the  book, released as The Dark Remains by Europa Editioons in their World Noir series. This is not so much a "young Laidlaw" sort of thing: instead, Lai ..read more

 Laura Lippman has recently been releaseing some of her most ambitious and succesful novels: I'm thinking in particular of the new-noir Sunburn and the new Dream Girl. Dream Girl is a twisty combination of horror (a la Stephen King's Misery, explicitly evoked in the book), a literary thriller, an academic comedy, and a meditation on resentment, revenge, andn authorship. Highly recommended and both compelling and fun. The Good Turn, by Dervla McTiernan, was the kind of hidden gem that sometimes turns up on the digital galley websites, offering previews to bloggers and critics. This is the ..read more

 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/nourishment-from-good-stories-on-gianrico-carofiglios-the-measure-of-time/ #lareviewofbooks ..read more

 I haven't been posting much lately, so to avoid the pressure of doing full reviews of the books I've read recently, I'm going to list some books with brief comments and recommendations.: Here are the first 3: Becoming Inspectyor Chen, by Qiu Xiaolong: The story follows 2 tracks, one in the present, in which Inspector Chen faces a dilemma of conscience more profound than the murder mystery he is (covertly) investigating. The other is the detective's backstory, beginning in the miseries of the Cultural Revolution and returning frequently to a lane of traditional houses that also figures in ..read more