Favourite Euro Crime Reads of 2015 - Karen

The Euro Crime reviewers' favourite reads of 2015 - individual posts - concludes today with my own offering. I will be doing a post revealing the overall Euro Crime favourite authors, titles and translators of 2015 - I've not compiled the list yet but this year it feels like there is less of a consensus compared to previous years.

My favourite reads of 2015

On Good Reads I have awarded 5 stars to three books this year and in author order they are:

M R C Kasasian - Death Descends on Saturn Villa
I read this during a difficult time for me and thankfully the latter didn't reduce my enjoyment of this third entry in the Gower Street Detective series.


Yrsa Sigurdardottir - The Silence of the Sea tr. Victoria Cribb
This was the very epitome of a page-turner. I could not put it down. A very worthy winner of the Petrona Award 2015 for best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year.
A yacht returns to Reykjavik with no-one on board though a family and a crew were on it when it left Portugal. Thora is hired by the grand-parents of the surviving child who did not go on the ill-fated trip to prove that the parents are dead. The narrative is split between Thora's investigations and a recounting of what happened aboard the yacht and is an extremely tense and compulsive read.


Sarah Ward - In Bitter Chill
A very atmospheric rural-noir crime novel which has both believable characters and a good plot. My review is here.

I have given 4 stars to more than two books and it's quite difficult to separate them however I'm going to plump for:

Jorn Lier Horst - The Hunting Dogs tr. Anne Bruce
This entry sees Wisting suspended and suspected of falsifying evidence. Wisting is a likeable, empathetic character who has an awkward relationship with his daughter Line a journalist. Line often ends up, though in a naturalistic way, running a parallel investigation into Wisting's cases from a “news” point of view.

Robert Karjel - My Name is N tr. Nancy Pick & Robert Karjel 
Here is part of the official blurb: "Ernst Grip of the Swedish security police has no idea why he is being summoned to the U.S. When he lands at a remote military base in the Indian Ocean, his escort, FBI agent Shauna Friedman, asks him to determine whether a prisoner who has been tortured by the CIA is a Swedish citizen.
At the military base, the prisoner, known only as N., refuses to talk. It appears he was involved in an Islamist-inspired terror attack in Topeka, Kansas. The attack was real, but the motivations behind it are not so simple. Evidence points to a group of desperate souls who survived the 2004 Thailand tsunami: a ruthless American arms dealer, a Czech hit man, a mysterious nurse from Kansas, a heartbreakingly naïve Pakistani – and a Swede."
An interesting book which is a bit different, and a thriller on a global stage.