translated by David Young, Mirror Books, 2018 The first novel in a five-volume police procedural series, Unrest, was published originally in 2012 to acclaim in Denmark. Now available in English, it’s an atmospheric mystery that combines a complex homicide investigation with the vivid backdrop of a major riot in the multi-ethnic Nørrebro district. Axel Steen is called in to begin investigating a homicide in his own neighborhood. A body has been found in a tranquil cemetery on a night when there’s another pitched battle between police and autonomists (a Marxist-flavored form of anarchism). A squ ..read more

I’m well behind on my Scandi crime reading, and even further behind on reading. Maybe I’m suffering from a bit of a reading slump; a lot of books just haven’t hit the spot for me lately, so I’m guessing it’s more me than the books. Regardless, here are thoughts on a couple of books I read recently. The Ice Swimmer by Kjell Ola Dahl, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett. Orenda, October 2018. This is the sixth English translation from a police procedural series set in Oslo. For those who’ve followed the series, the ensemble of characters and their relationships is likely familiar. The ..read more

I’m not sure what to make of this interesting “long read,” an excerpt from a book titled Dead Girls by Alice Bolin. This essay is a mix of critical examination of the Martin Beck series and the Millennium Trilogy and memoir. I believe I have an allergy to the memoir genre, since it always makes me uncomfortable to read an author’s intimate take on their living family members, even if they’re okay with it – I feel trapped in a place where I’m overhearing a conversation I shouldn’t among people who are not fully clothed, but if I come out of my hiding place, “excuse me, sorry,” they’ll all stare ..read more

QUICKSAND by Malin Persson Giolito, translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles, is this year’s Petrona Award winner. Congrats to both author and translator! This is a bit bittersweet just now in the United States as the subject of school shootings is a bit too raw. Another one just happened after students began a powerful movement to end school shootings. Of course, these don’t happen with anything like the US frequency in other countries, so the dynamics are different and the focus here is on the backstory – what would lead a privileged girl to become involved in committing violenc ..read more

In memory of Maxine Clarke, a brilliant science editor and crime fiction fan par excellence, the Petrona Award is an annual sorting and sifting of the year’s new crime fiction publications from the Nordic countries in English translation. Here’s what the (extraordinarily qualified) judges have concluded about Scancinavian crime fiction in 2017.     Six outstanding crime novels from Denmark, Finland and Sweden have made the shortlist for the 2018 Petrona Award for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year, which is announced today. WHAT MY BODY REMEMBERS by Agnete Friis, tr. Lind ..read more

They extend winter, invented modern crime fiction, and celebrate Easter by reading about murder. Who? The Norwegians, of course. By Glenn Folkvord This article, originally published in The Norwegian-American, is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author, who retains the copyright. Tusen takk! Påskekrim (photo by Tormod Ulsberg) One would think that after a long, dark and bitter winter, Norwegians would welcome spring, sun and the promise of summer. That is probably true for the cold challenged, but many Norwegians choose to extend the winter by spending the Easter holid ..read more

A friend pointed out this article by Winston Cook-Wilson in Spin on Nordic crime fiction television dramas. Of course availability varies based on where you are and if you subscribe to what (to me, at any rate) is a dizzying array of streaming services. Cook-Wilson offers several tempting options and also comments on the influence Scandinavian crime fiction has had on Scandinavian television – and on television dramas elsewhere. The Scandinavian sensibility has come to influence crime fiction, television, and film, all over the world thanks to the international popularity of Stieg Larsson’s M ..read more

I was fortunate to get a review copy of a self-published book from a new author who goes under the name P. J. Boock. He is a a Norwegian social scientist who does research on the intersections of political economy, sociology, and psychology and is currently working in public service in the US. I can’t tell you who he is – I’m sworn to secrecy – but he’s written a cracking good mystery. It’s set in Norway and there are no monstrously clever serial killers, unreliable narrators, or gory scenes of carnage visited by dedicated if troubled detectives. If I were to give it a genre label I’d call it ..read more

I’ve neglected this blog for a while, being tied up with this and that and having my fondness of crime fiction challenged by a variety of things happening in the world. I’ve neglected my old reading community, too, partly because the group founded by Maxine Clark used a social media platform that was gobbled up by Facebook around the time that Google discontinued Reader and I never quite got back into the habit of reading blogs in their natural state. What really keeps it all together isn’t the technology, it’s the people, and after the shock of losing Maxine, I feel very much the same discov ..read more

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