Review: Evil Things by Katja Ivar

Evil Things by Katja Ivar, January 2019, 320 pages, Bitter Lemon Press, ISBN: 1912242095

Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here and here.)

Feeling curiously devoid of emotion, Hella ran down the steps to where a canvas sack stood on the frozen earth, a dark brown stain spread across it like some exotic flower. She motioned towards it.
“Is it inside?”

Ivalo Police Headquarters, Northern Finland, 13th October 1952.
The speck on the map that is the Sami village of Käärmela, surrounded by marshes and hills, makes Hella wonder why she is determined to go there. Chief Inspector Eklund, her boss, has dismissed the idea of a crime. An accident, he says. An old man disappears, probably got lost or drunk. Hella points out that a man born in that forest wouldn’t get lost. Nor would he leave his six year old grandson alone for days. Eklund is scornful. The man is probably not the perfect grandfather that she imagines. She tries again, pointing out that the local priest’s wife has reported it to them. Won’t an uninvestigated report ruin the section’s statistics? Eklund seems to grow uncomfortable. He orders Hella to tell the priest’s wife that with winter snows due they cannot send an investigator but will take up the case in May when the snows melt. After a long unpleasant haggle which includes suffering Eklund’s opinion that Hella would be better off looking for a husband at the next town ball, Hella takes Eklund’s offer of vacation time to visit the village. But only for a couple of days. She forces a smile at her boss.

Käärmela, near the Finnish-Soviet border.
The priest’s wife, Irja, again tries to reassure the silent little boy that his grandfather will return soon. Four days ago an old woman had dragged the boy into Irja’s home claiming that his grandfather was missing, probably dead, and that she had had to beat the boy to get him to leave the empty house. He won’t eat, sleep or speak, said the woman. It's Irja’s duty, as the priest’s wife, to look after him. Irja tried to reassure the distraught boy as he clutched their old cat for comfort. Putting him to bed, she immediately wrote a letter to the Ivalo Police about the missing grandfather.

Ivalo Police Headquarters, 14th October 1952
Persistently irritated by the sign on her door which reads “H. Mauzer, Polyssister” (she was Helsinki’s first woman detective for God’s sake, not a tea-maker cum hand-holder), Hella is further annoyed to see that her colleague Ranta has again been snooping around her office. She concentrates on leaving her desk in scrupulous order with a view to appeasing Chief Inspector Eklund. At home she packs: a rucksack, walking boots, warm clothes, notebook, her coffee pot. She shudders at having to accept a lift north with Kukoyakka, the only logging driver willing to take her. She decides to take her gun. True, the armed conflict in the countryside is quieter now but if Kukoyakka pushes his luck… She smiles.

Käärmela, same day.
The priest's wife has another visitor, a neighbour of the boy and his grandfather. Has he come to ask after the little boy? No, he says. He has decided to buy the missing man’s house. The boy can live with her and the priest after all. He reaches into his coat and pulls out some notes, pushing them across the table to her. The price of a bag of fish. He rises, announcing the deal done. Irja is outraged and pushes the money back at him explaining that now is not the time. “Bitch!” For a moment she is frightened of him but she stands her ground and he leaves.
Irja had asked the Ivalo police about the disappearance but had been treated with contempt. The boy keeps asking when they will arrive and despite her own doubts she humours him. When a tall angular figure in a parka and carrying a pack approaches their house through the dusk the boy is positive it is the police. Then he whispers in disbelief, “It’s a woman”...

EVIL THINGS is Katya Ivar’s first novel. Raised in both Russia and the US and now living in Paris, Ivar has given us, in EVIL THINGS, a gripping police procedural set in an unfamiliar time and place for most crime readers. Set in a remote community in a time of political turmoil but also a time and society pushing women to conform to tradition, Katja Ivar's collected portraits of the women who conform and those who don't are strikingly drawn. Hella Mauzer herself, as befits a central “cop” figure, is always at the edge: the outsider, the misfit, considered by her colleagues to be mad, bad and possibly dangerous to know. The first woman investigative police officer in Helsinki until disgraced, downgraded and moved to a remote posting in Ivalo near the Finnish-Russian border, Hella is convinced that there is something to investigate in a grandfather’s disappearance from his remote Lapp village, she wangles her way onto the case and organises a search party. When they find animal-savaged human remains in the forest snow it is Hella who realises that the remains are those of a woman and this is truly a murder investigation. Ivar’s slow reveal of Hella's character and past add to the suspense in this mystery filled with strong character writing. Ultimately Hella leads us into a frantic race and final battle of wits to uncover and confront both society’s demons and her own. A strong start to what I hope will become a Hella Mauzer series.

Lynn Harvey, March 2019

Review: The Cold Summer by Gianrico Carofiglio tr. Howard Curtis

The Cold Summer by Gianrico Carofiglio translated by Howard Curtis, September 2018, 276 pages, Bitter Lemon Press, ISBN: 1912242036

Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here and here.)

“… You’re close to the shit, too, like all of us. But you never get it on you. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s like you had some kind of power …
Maybe it annoys me because I admire you, or vice versa. Am I talking crap?”
“No, you’re making perfect sense.”

1992, Bari, Southern Italy, summer-time.
Marshal Pietro Fenoglio sits in his favourite cafe so engrossed in the local newspaper editor’s advice to the police on handling a Mafia flare-up that he doesn’t immediately notice the young man trying to rob the cashier. When he does – he quickly overcomes the would-be robber and pins him to the floor. The cafe unfreezes and the carabinieri are called. Two men walk in and demand Fenoglio hands over the thief. They are not carabinieri. They say they will teach the thief a lesson. Fenoglio promises the men a lengthy stay at the police station if they don’t clear off – which they do. Then he pays for his breakfast pastry despite the owner’s objections and accompanies the young robber to the police station. Frankly, Fenoglio is tempted to let him go. He likes him, believes that this was, as he says, his first robbery attempt. But there are rules. He tells the young man to plea bargain and in all likelihood he will get a suspended sentence. The arrestee is grateful, telling Fenoglio that if he ever needs help he will find him hanging out near the Petruzzelli theatre. The mention of the theatre sours Fenoglio. It had been one of the things he had liked about Bari: concerts, an opera. But someone torched the theatre a few months ago. Now it’s just a burnt-out shell.

Captain Valente, new boss, fresh from Rome, summons Fenoglio to his office and asks him to bring him up to speed on the local mafia fight. Fenoglio obliges. A few weeks ago Shorty, a member of local crime boss Grimaldi's gang, was murdered. Since then several high profile Grimaldi gang members have disappeared or been killed. Valente assumes it’s a rival gang but Fenoglio points out that no-one outside the group has been killed. This looks more like battles within the gang itself.

Over a solitary lunch in a local trattoria, Fenoglio thinks about his current equally solitary life; his recent separation from Serena. The cause? His obsession with work perhaps but truly he thinks it’s because he can’t have children. Fenoglio knows that he has never been any good at showing his feelings. He feels them, but... Would Serena have a child with someone else? Could he stand that?

Back at the office they receive a tip-off. Grimaldi’s son has been kidnapped. Using a traffic violation as cover, Fenoglio questions one of Grimaldi’s associates known as the Accountant. Apparently the boy disappeared on the way to school a couple of days ago. The Accountant confirms there has been a ransom demand but cannot say whether it was paid or not. Fenoglio’s musings over the delicate procedure of demanding the appearance of a local Mafia boss and his wife at a police station are interrupted by news of a shoot-out in a neighbouring village. These incidents and killings are escalating in some kind of silent bubble, corroborating Fenoglio’s belief in an internal gang war. What is more the ransom, it seems, has been paid but the boy hasn’t been returned. They are interviewing the woman who delivered the ransom money when they get the grimmest news of all; the boy’s body has been found at the bottom of an isolated well. He has been dead for days…

Celebrated Italian crime writer, anti-Mafia prosecutor and one-time senator, Gianrico Carofiglio, embarks on a new series with THE COLD SUMMER (translated here by experienced Carofiglio translator Howard Curtis). It introduces Marshal Pietro Fenoglio of the Bari Carabinieri: solitary, thoughtful, reserved, a Northerner from Turin, carabiniere for twenty years and a man of principle. Events revolve around the tragic death of a kidnapped child and are set against the back-drop of real-life events – the Mafia assassinations of two high-profile anti-Mafia judges in 1992. In some parts the writing blends the action of police procedural with the cool reportage of legal deposition. This last might sound tedious but the formal language of the deposition serves to both collapse time and to filter the savagery of the violent crime. And Carofiglio's description of the structure and ritual of the “Societa Nostra” is engrossing and absorbing; simultaneously grandiose and elaborate, they function to confirm a gang member’s loyalty and even the subservience of locals to the rule and composition of the “Family” – perhaps an ornate mirror of modern day urban gang culture. The characters are closely observed: Fenoglio’s complex, reticent personality offset by the almost brutal character of his colleague Pellecchia. Finally a mix of random and purposeful events (Carofiglio has said that: “… real world investigations and trials are much more ruled by chance than in films and novels.”) move this story to an eventual darker turn and protagonist.

Strongly recommended. I look forward to more.

Lynn Harvey, January 2019

Review: Big Sister by Gunnar Staalesen tr. Don Bartlett

Big Sister by Gunnar Staalesen translated by Don Bartlett, June 2018, 271 pages, Orenda Books, ISBN: 9781912374199

Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here and here.)

Norway, Bergen, Spring 2003
Moving out of his office whilst the owners redevelop the building has been unsettling enough for private investigator Varg Veum. But now he is back behind his desk and the woman sitting across from him is telling him that she is his sister. Varg tells her that he found a birth certificate and adoption papers amongst his mother’s things but he admits that he had been reluctant to look for her. His sister in turn had visited their mother back in 1975, to find out who her father was. However big sister Norma Johanne can’t tell Varg anything about the yellowed newspaper cutting he also found amongst their mother’s papers, an article about a jazz band called The Hurrycanes. In fact Norma has really come to Varg to ask him to find her god-daughter Emma, a 19-year-old trainee nurse who disappeared several weeks ago. Her Bergen landlord and flatmates say that she packed up and moved out but they don’t know where to and she isn’t answering her phone. Emma’s father happens to live in Bergen but he left the family under a cloud when Emma was only two years old. Norma Johanne has tried the police but they think she has just taken off somewhere and aren’t interested in pursuing an investigation. So she has come to Varg. Explaining that only the police can check Emma’s bank cards and phone, Varg agrees to investigate.

Varg's first try is Emma’s last known address starting with the landlord's flat on the top floor of the building. There is not much there for him except the landlord’s wife who is drunk and available, her husband being away on business. Varg makes his way downstairs to Emma’s apartment where he speaks to one of the flat mates. She seems disinterested and vague, explaining that they hadn’t really known Emma, she had simply answered their advert for a housemate. But she does remember her once talking about trying to see her father. Emma’s father must be Varg’s next step. There he is greeted by the father’s second wife, Emma’s stepmother, dressed in a tracksuit and impatient to get out on her twice daily run. She dismisses any talk about “that hysterical daughter”. There is a sizeable motorbike chained in the carport and Emma’s father, dressed in leather and denim, is hostile too. He doesn’t want anything to do with Emma. He doesn’t care what, if anything, has happened to her. He never really knew her anyway. Varg continues his search: Emma’s schoolfriend, now studying in Berlin; Emma’s college; her fellow students. But he draws a blank and his impression is that nobody cares much about the girl except perhaps her friend in Berlin.

The past begins to haunt both Emma’s story and that of Varg as he and his new sister make their tentative first steps in connection. Shadowy motives and past traumas begin to emerge alongside connections to a biker gang. Another death closer to home ensnares Varg into real physical danger but still the mystery of Emma refuses to yield its answers until the end of this surprisingly poignant story.

BIG SISTER is the first novel that I have read in Staalesen’s mammoth, established and prize-winning Varg Veum series. I can only hang my head in shame that it has taken so long for me to arrive here. But this also means that there is one thing I can vouch for: Staalesen weaves Veum’s past into the narrative so deftly that the reader can pick up the thread of his life, in as much as it relates to the story, seamlessly. Neither too much is explained nor too little. My hat is doffed. This is the ninth of the UK published Varg Veum series and reads easily and fluently in this translation by Don Bartlett, veteran translator of Nesbo and Knausgaard.
Bartlett himself once described Staalesen’s crime writing as “soft hard-boiled crime”. I suspect Staalesen pays homage to Raymond Chandler and his American West Coast creation Philip Marlowe in its details: the bottle of spirit in the office desk drawer; Norma Johanne Bakkevik – does that ring a bell for Norma Jean Baker/Marilyn Monroe? Even the title of this novel recalls Chandler’s own titled work “The Little Sister”. But perhaps I’m getting carried away.

In BIG SISTER, Staalesen has written a densely interwoven mystery and it's down to Varg Veum to pick apart the strands; a solidly satisfying private eye tale crafted with detailed storytelling, pace, wit and a compassionate eye.
A definite recommend.

Lynn Harvey, November 2018

Review: Palm Beach, Finland by Antti Tuomainen tr. David Hackston

Palm Beach, Finland by Antti Tuomainen translated by David Hackston, October 2018, 304 pages, Orenda Books, ISBN: 1912374315

Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

It was a misunderstanding, a delicate imbalance between push and shove. And thus the neck broke like a plank snapping in two.

Palm Beach Finland, Summer:
39 year-old lifeguard “Chico” Korhonen waits near the resort’s huge sign as agreed. He thinks the place looks great these days. Its greyness transformed by new owner Jorma Leivo; the place glows. Huts gleam with fresh paint, pink, blue, green; a shop, pizzeria, sunshades dotting the beach, a windsurfing setup. OK, the biting breeze and cold water means the deckchairs are empty but Chico enjoys walking past the newly planted row of plastic palm trees every day. Life is bright and new. The incident with the fat woman, her handbag and the lunch vouchers was tricky but the boss has told Chico that he is looking for someone with a bit of street savvy. He might be able to put “a little extra” his way. So now Chico waits for his best friend Robin (not the sharpest knife in the drawer) and their meeting with Leivo to discuss that “little extra”.

Leivo is a big man with a head-turning fashion sense and fair hair that curls upwards around his bald crown. He is sweating profusely as he explains, in his gruff teddy-bear voice, that the “little extra” he has in mind is to put some pressure on the owner of a neighbouring plot of land. Nothing serious – a smashed window, a stolen bicycle, a bit of urinating through the letterbox – but he needs that land signed over within the month, understand?
Chico and Robin stake out the neighbour’s house that evening. A ground floor light comes on. They throw stones which shatter the window. But then there is all this yelling. The pair erupt into the kitchen. There is blood everywhere, including over the woman’s face. She starts attacking them with an electric whisk, long hair flying, and it all goes west from there. They floor her. Chico grabs her feet, Robin wraps his arm around her neck and they are carrying her towards the door when Chico slips, Robin carries on moving and, crack, she goes limp. They lay her down. Definitely dead. But also … she's a he. How did that happen?

National Bureau of Investigation, Vantaa, two weeks later:
Jan Nyman’s boss briefs him on the new case, a body in a small town; local investigation, no results; regional investigation, no results. But it must be a professional job. The victim was beaten and his neck broken in a way that indicates an expert knowledge of anatomy. The woman who owns the house has an alibi but maybe she was involved, a contract hit. Jan is to make the undercover investigation; he is “Jan Kaunisto”, a maths teacher on holiday. But the boss is convinced that the woman is pulling the strings.

The woman in question, Olivia Koski, is discussing drainage issues with the local plumber. She wants to live in the house left to her by her father but it needs a lot of work, total renovation. She whittles down the plumber’s estimate. They agree an amount. But Olivia knows that her bank account contains zilch. Just as the whole town knows that this is the house where a murder took place. She’s got herself a job and her shift is starts soon. She changes into her uniform, looks at herself in the mirror, and feels just as naked as she did yesterday.

Helsinki:
Holma is dangling a man by his knees over a balcony when the news comes through on his phone that his brother is dead. He has had to release his grip on the man in order to answer his phone and hears the subsequent thump. It seems his brother died two weeks ago in some woman’s house in a small town somewhere. Holma knows his brother is – was – a disaster; they started their criminal life together. And whilst Holma has come far, his brother has not. Nevertheless, family is family. Anyone so much as touches his brother – Holma gets into his car...

Jan Nyman may be an undercover policeman but PALM BEACH FINLAND is no police procedural. Award-winning Finnish writer Antti Tuomainen takes a different approach with each novel: environmental speculative fiction; investigative thriller; psychological thriller. This latest, PALM BEACH FINLAND, brings us satire and criminal slapstick. It’s a dark farce in which a group of characters chase their dreams or rather those that money can buy. The resulting intersecting motives, misinterpretations and violent acts take place in and around an unlikely Baltic beach resort. But glimpses of Finland peek through this Americana setting: pine trees, wooden houses, a tide-less Baltic beach and the exquisite portrait of Miss Simola – an elderly, erotic Finnish earth spirit. (Well, I think so.)

Antti Tuomainen always steps into the new with each novel and PALM BEACH FINLAND, in this assured translation by David Hackston, takes a Finnish slice from the comic, crazy, greedy, crime world of the likes of Get Shorty or Fargo. Where will Tuomainen's imagination take us next?
I don’t know but before that – read this one.

Absolutely recommended.

Lynn Harvey, November 2018

Review: Zen and the Art of Murder by Oliver Bottini tr. Jamie Bulloch

Zen and the Art of Murder by Oliver Bottini translated by Jamie Bulloch, August 2018, 384 pages, MacLehose Press, ISBN: 0857057367

Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

She leaped up. “I don’t booze, for Christ’s sake!” The sentence resonated in her head, just as the footsteps crunching in the snow had echoed the night before. I don’t booze.

Saturday morning, Liebau, Germany.
It’s snowing. Hollerer glances out of his kitchen window just as a shaven-headed monk, dressed only in dark robe and sandals, appears out of the driving snow and makes his way along the street. A vision sent by my wife, Hollerer thinks. Some time later he recalls that the monk had been bruised about the head – perhaps not a vision. He buttons his police uniform over his paunch, fetches his service weapon from the bedside table and sets out to find the monk. At the steps of the village church a crowd including the mayor are gathering around the young man sitting cross-legged and silent, his bowl in front of him. The villagers are unhappy and want him gone. No begging is allowed after all and he could be just a forerunner for other cult members to come. Hollerer buys food for the monk who, by gesture, insists on sharing it with him. For now, annoyed by the mayor’s insistence that he do something, Officer Hollerer retreats.

Saturday morning, Freiburg.
42-year-old Kripo detective Louise Boni wakes up to snow. She hates it. Everything bad that has happened to her has happened in the snow. Her boss rings to call her into work but she refuses. His next phone message threatens disciplinary action and Louise takes her time calling back. Something strange is happening in Liebau, no-one else is available so Louise must go and take a look. Too hungover to drive, she takes a taxi and by the time she arrives in Liebau the monk has left – with Officer Hollerer following him in a patrol car. A young patrolman, eager to display his own “rally-driver” skills, gives Louise a lift to where Hollerer is parked in a white wasteland watching a black dot moving slowly up a hill. Louise and Hollerer follow the monk on foot but soon the overweight policeman reaches his limit. Louise borrows his gun, continues alone and eventually catches up with the monk. They walk in silence and later, helped out by supplies of food and warm clothing ferried by Hollerer and the young patrolman, Louise and the monk enter the forest where they shelter for the night. She establishes that he is Japanese and can understand English but he remains largely silent. Louise, caught up in alcohol-fuelled thoughts and haunted by images of her dead brother, divorced husband and the man she killed, eventually sleeps – waking to the grey light of dawn and the sound of a man’s voice. The monk is wide-eyed with fear, gesturing for her to follow him. They hide until full daylight when the monk resumes his journey.

Louise hands over the task of following him to the day shift, Hollerer and a colleague from Freiburg. The young Liebau policeman drives her back to the Freiburg headquarters. The ensuing argument with her boss is fierce. Louise wants back-up, cars and a helicopter. He wants her on enforced sick leave, “rehab” and a planned return to a desk job. In fact he insists that calls for back-up and helicopters based on “the hallucinations of a piss-head and the wanderings of a half-naked foreigner” are out of the question. Louise returns to her desk and asks her new Liebau colleague to start compiling a list of the nearest Buddhist institutions. Her boss interrupts and orders her home: “You’re on sick leave”…

ZEN AND THE ART OF MURDER is the first novel in Bottini’s "Black Forest Investigation" series and won a Deutsche Krimi Preis when it was published in 2005. Full of psychology and a wry wit, this story deals in the dark matter of child trafficking and murder. Louise is shut out from the official investigation, but stubbornly continues to prise open the riddle surrounding the terrified monk and his pursuers. But not before another death in the snow has shattered her fragile state. In Louise Boni, Oliver Bottini has created a convincing anchor – a woman flailing around amidst the clink of empty bottles; keeping a desperate grip on her self and her career through gut instinct and persistence. In fact Louise’s interior life provides almost as much suspense as that of the hunt for the killers. Bottini’s well-written characters bring humanity to the events and the story reads smoothly in Jamie Bulloch’s translation. This edition includes a short story prequel which fills out the details of the previous case that still haunts Louise.

Greatly recommended, particularly for lovers of the uphill struggles of the lone detective. A classic Nordic Noir set in the snows of a German winter.

Lynn Harvey, August 2018

Review: Blue Night by Simone Buchholz tr. Rachel Ward

Blue Night by Simone Buchholz translated by Rachel Ward, February 2018, 276 pages, Orenda, ISBN: 1912374013

Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

“Driving through the countryside alone is like eating sellotape.”

Public prosecutor Chastity Riley’s car coughs and dies somewhere near Mecklenburgh. Since she accused her boss of corruption and shot off a gangster’s family jewels with an unauthorised firearm, Chastity has been sidelined into witness protection – and protection is all she is allowed to do, no investigating. So this country-weekend thing has been an attempt to break the monotony. It hasn’t worked. Now she has to get back to Hamburg for a case and she really needs a lift. Faller, with his big, 1970s, mid-life crisis totem Pontiac, is the one she chooses (all of her other friends being asleep, driving-license free, or out of it). She calls Faller, takes her bag out of her car and sets off down the road in the direction of Hamburg. Later, in that city’s St Georg Hospital, she stares at her unconscious client. He is smashed up badly. Ribs, arms and legs broken and a missing index finger. She holds his huge paw of a hand until night-time then takes a taxi home. Klatsche is making cheese sandwiches to go with the beer. Lifesaver.

Summer of 1982:
Faller: “I still visit Minou’s grave. A girl from the red-light district who died because I wanted her.”
Riley: “Frankfurt glows gold, orange, pink. We ride bikes. I wear my Dad’s American Army shirts. I miss my Mum.”
Klatsche: “I haven’t been born yet.”
Joe: “Hey. Hamburg.”

Hamburg, present day:
Klatsche is out shopping, stocking up his bar “Blue Night”. Chastity returns to her flat to shower then on to forensics at Police Headquarters to examine her client’s clothes: a good made to measure suit, no label; British shirt, American shoes. Upstairs she visits her friend Calabretta who has been locked into himself since his girlfriend dumped him for a Swiss professor. But now, Chastity is thinking that the life is returning to his eyes. Next, to size up the place where her client was attacked. It must have been a gang, no way could it have been a one man job. That evening, whilst baby-sitting Calabretta at Carla and Rocco's cafe, an activity which involves a lot of booze, Calabretta remarks that he thinks Faller is up to something – maybe wanting to go after The Albanian again.

1987:
Faller: “Homicide Squad. I’m new here. A lot of death since coke hit the red-light district.”
Riley: “Why is everyone falling in love?”
Joe: “I mostly work in St Pauli, quick and quiet.”

Hamburg, present day:
The hospital calls Chastity at 5.30 am, the patient is awake. Chastity however is very hungover. The police guard outside her client’s room nods her through when she presents her pass. Her client stares at her. Chastity thinks he was more charming unconscious. When he does speak, his accent is Austrian. He says his name is Joe...

BLUE NIGHT is the first of prize-winning crime writer Simone Buchholz’ “Chastity Riley” series to be published in the UK. Its lively, true-feeling translation by Rachel Ward allows this tale of bars, beers and the nightlife of St Pauli in Hamburg to read well at a brisk pace. Chastity is the daughter of an American serviceman stationed in Germany, brought up by him after her mother left them. By the time of this book she is only just hanging on to her job as a public prosecutor after having exposed some inconvenient truths in the department. She is bored, persona non grata and barred from investigating. But she is also surrounded by a network of friends with equally chequered backgrounds to buoy her up – hence the bars, cafes and beers. It goes without saying that when landed with the job of “protecting” a badly beaten giant of an Austrian who is giving nothing away, Chastity cannot resist some of that forbidden investigating. Who attacked him and why? The investigation takes her to a new contact in the old East, in Leipzig, and a glimpse of the devastation caused by the latest cheap, virulent drug heading in Hamburg's direction.

Buchholz quickly establishes her characters and their individual voices: the ex-jailbird bar owner, a broken hearted cop, an ex-cop with a vengeful eye set on the local crime boss (now “retired” and untouchable) who killed his girlfriend years ago, and an injured Austrian stoic with a missing finger. But it goes without saying that the predominant voice in the story is that of unorthodox, street-savvy and very likeable Chastity. Written with a sense of place, a fresh voice, and a fast pace.

Absolutely recommended.

Lynn Harvey, August 2018

Review: The First Prehistoric Serial Killer and other stories by Teresa Solana tr. Peter Bush

The First Prehistoric Serial Killer and other stories by Teresa Solana translated by Peter Bush, August 2018, 210 pages, Bitter Lemon Press, ISBN: 1912242079

Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

I’d never been held up at gun-point before or seen anyone die (in real-life, that is), let alone like that. Bang-bang, a couple of shots and you’re on your way to the other side. You’ll soon see when I put the photos on Instagram …

THE FIRST PREHISTORIC SERIAL KILLER is a collection of short stories by Barcelona-born novelist and translator Teresa Solana. It’s a lively, bizarre, witty, cruel, crude and sometimes picaresque collection. The first five tales start with the story that gives the collection its name: three dead Neanderthals found with their heads bashed in with a rock, one after the other, prompt the weakling of the tribe to find out how they died (after all he has to keep his place in the group somehow). Be prepared for an anachronistic tale with a sharp eye for social status and a sly humour. The following four stories cover motifs such as domestic murder and a solution to corpse disposal, death and satire in the art world, ghosts in a quandary – and vampires in the era of sunblock. The remaining stories in the collection make up the prize-winning “Connections”; a kaleidoscopic collection of eight crime stories involving characters and events in and around Barcelona, all touched by a shooting in a Barcelona pharmacy.

This was my first foray into crime fiction in short story form and I was worried that I would grow tired of what I thought could become a predictable format. But Solana is not predictable and the outcome was that I enjoyed these stories hugely. Translated by Teresa Solana’s husband Peter Bush, this translation must be one of the closest matches to the writer’s voice and intentions possible. Solana’s earthy, dark wit; her ability to speak through varied characters; her satirical eye for the layers and workings of Barcelona society (which speak to everyone everywhere) and her finely crafted invention that knits together the stories in “Connections” mean that I shall definitely be on the hunt for a full length Teresa Solana novel.

Very highly recommended – for those with a taste for murder, the surreal, and possibly – the stories of Saki.

Lynn Harvey, August 2018

Review: Baby Blue by Pol Koutsakis tr. Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife

Baby Blue by Pol Koutsakis translated by Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife, June 2018, 292 pages, Bitter Lemon Press, ISBN: 190852491X

Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

We always let down those we love most. And we always take the gamble that they’ll understand.

A spring night in Athens:
When a friend rings Stratos Gazis asking for his help, Stratos is surprised. After all it’s Stratos who usually calls him, not the other way round. Stratos immediately sets out into the Athenian traffic despite longing to see his current and childhood love Maria as they had arranged. At six foot three and 220 pounds Gazis draws attention and as he dislikes drawing anyone’s attention his route is carefully planned. Stratos is a “caretaker”; he takes care of people with a gun. But he doesn’t think of himself as a hit man. He does his research and if he considers the target doesn’t deserve to die then he won’t take the job. That’s his deal. He’s the best and he can afford rules.

Angelino is the old friend from the streets, an information dealer, who has asked for Stratos’ help and tonight Stratos finds himself a world away from the decrepit square Angelino used to live on with his ancient dog Hector. Stratos is buzzed into a graffiti-less neoclassical building past security guards and into a spacious sitting room filled with twenty guests at least. Angelino is hosting an investors evening. All of the guests are entranced by a young girl performing incredible feats of conjuring and magic. This is Emma; prodigiously talented, beautiful – and blind. Emma is the investment in question. To be precise, her bid to take part in the Magic Olympics. Winner takes Vegas and New York. And it is also Emma who is asking for help. She tells Stratos that when she was little she was rescued from an orphanage by a journalist. He brought her up and she regarded him as her father. They ended up living on the streets after he left his job. Three years ago he was murdered – tortured and shot. It was Emma who found his body. Now she wants Stratos to find her father’s murderer. She wants revenge.

It’s after midnight when Stratos hurries back to Maria. He spots a familiar car parked on his street. It belongs to another old friend, his closest, Kostas Dragas known as Drag, a famous homicide cop with the Athens police. Not the usual companion for a “caretaker” but again … it goes back to tough childhoods. Drag wants to discuss his latest case with Stratos: a series of killings. All of the victims had been spotlighted by a local TV station; named, shamed and identified as paedophiles. All were tortured and shot in the same distinctive manner and it looks professional. Drag agrees that it’s not Stratos. Still, he wants his view on the killings. In return Drag requests the coroner’s report on Emma’s father. But when the report comes back Stratos is struck by its details. The body of Emma’s so-called father bore all the same hallmarks as those of the dead paedophiles...

Pol Koutsakis is a Greek writer and playwrite and BABY BLUE is his second crime novel narrated by the character Stratos Gazis. (The first is ATHENIAN BLUES.) In this story Stratos takes on a convoluted, action-filled hunt for both the killer of Emma’s protector and the Avenger, a serial killer of paedophiles. He also juggles with his feelings for Maria; his knowledge of the danger that his chosen role brings her. The novel slices through modern day Athens from bottom to top; from the decay and corruption of modern Athenian poverty to the luxury and power of those who still “have”. According to writer Pol Koutsakis this is what fuelled him to create the ambiguous character of Stratos, a hard-bitten hero who straddles a grey area of morality. I do wonder if ambiguity of character is allowed to stretch to the women in Stratos’ world; they do seem to be either saints or sinners in his eyes. But I'm being rather tough. This is the world of Noir films that Stratos loves and frequently quotes. And in his noir world Stratos is much more Robert Mitchum than Bogart; tall, strong, menacing, he is effective, he does the job. I just miss a touch of Chandler wit to soften the bullet, if you pardon my phrase.

Modern Athens noir. Tough and unforgiving.

Lynn Harvey, July 2018

Review: The Memory of Evil by Roberto Costantini tr. N S Thompson

The Memory of Evil by Roberto Costantini translated by N S Thompson, March 2016, 480 pages, riverrun, ISBN: 0857389408

Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

2011, Zawiya, Libya.
Men awaiting execution are noosed to a row of poplar trees leading to the village’s burnt-out, shot-out school. The Berbers, or Amazighs, have been amongst the first to rebel against Gaddafi earlier in the year and now this Amazigh village has been captured by his troops. An armoured SUV draws up and an Arab man in his 60s gets out: civilian dress, dark glasses, part of his ear missing. In the dust of the hot desert wind, this man calls the tune for both Gaddafi’s troops and their white mercenary leader as he dictates the ingredients for a vile and cruel massacre that spares not a man, woman or child in Zawiya.

1962, Tripoli, Libya.
As the desert wind blows sand into the villa courtyard four boys, two Arab and two Italian, solemnly cut their wrists and share an oath of blood brotherhood. Sand and blood. For ever.

2011, Rome, Italy.
Commissario Michele Balistreri walks through early morning Rome, exercising his painful knee before spending the rest of the day, as he prefers, indoors. First an espresso in his favourite bar. The radio spills out the latest on the war in Libya and in particular a brutal massacre at Zawiya. Balistreri leaves and heads for the office. He doesn’t want to hear any more about that war. He wants the darkness of his office.

2011, Tripoli, Libya.
Linda Nardi stretches out on her hotel bed in the quiet of sunset before the night brings the roar of NATO jets. She remembers her closeness with Michele Balistreri five years ago. They had talked, ate, spent time together, without so much as a kiss but it had ended badly. She knows that she should be getting on with the job of reporting this war, the massacre – but what she really wants is to return to her orphans and hospitals in Central Africa. In the morning she will be boarding a plane to Nairobi but for now …
In the hotel bar she bumps into a Lebanese acquaintance from Nairobi. What brings him here? “War is manna from heaven to businessmen”, he says. She asks about the hospital contract in Nairobi. Yes, he won the construction contract: Kenyan accounting, Italian rules. But the investors are Swiss? Nothing is ever really Swiss. He goes on to hint at profitable dealings for a certain bank, God’s Bank, in the Vatican state.
Just then Linda notices a beautiful Western woman surrounded by an obviously Libyan Secret Service group crossing the bar. They are followed by an Arab in his 60s, deeply lined face, part of an ear missing. The Lebanese businessman pales.
Is that a business competitor? No. Have you heard what happened in Zawiya, Miss Nardi? They say that man was behind the death of General Younis … Suddenly her acquaintance remembers something he must attend to. Sick of both Libya and the war, Linda returns to her thoughts of Nairobi.

THE MEMORY OF EVIL is Roberto Costantini's final part of his Commissario Balistreri trilogy. By 2011 (the primary setting of THE MEMORY OF EVIL) bad boy Michele Balistreri, sworn childhood blood-brother of Ahmed, Karim and Nico in 1960s Libya is reaching the end of his career as Head of Rome's Murder Squad. He is a man well-versed on both sides of the criminal fence, in his 60s, exhausted, in ill health and approaching retirement. Although the story begins with journalist Linda Nardi’s investigation of corruption in Nairobi and the death of a beautiful young woman and her two year-old daughter on board a cruise ship off Elba, these crimes are counter played by Balistreri’s increasing obsession with the past, in particular the riddle of his mother’s death in Tripoli of 1969. Supposedly a suicide, Michele is convinced she was murdered. But which of the people he knew and loved back then had killed her?

My sense of Roberto Costantini's trilogy is that it is a work in its own right. So I have to ask if it is a problem not to have read its previous novels. Costantini keeps events clear and apparent in the timeline so the problem is unlikely to be that of missing important elements in the narrative. But as THE MEMORY OF EVIL’s narrative heat rises, its chapters come short and fast, referring back and forth between 2011 and 1960s Libya as seen through the eyes of different characters. This focusses and builds tension but it’s possible that the staccato changes may confuse a reader new to the trilogy.

Above all THE MEMORY OF EVIL is crime fiction. It encompasses violence and unlikeable characters doing unspeakable things, investigative journalism and police procedural, plot twists and suspense, skilful writing and translation. But I do recommend this “saga” of an influential Italian family and its circle set against the backdrop of events in twentieth century North Africa and Italy during the rise and fall of Gaddafi. These are times, places and points of view not often caught in crime fiction and Costantini’s writing of this story is authoritative.

Lynn Harvey, June 2018.

Review: The Temptation of Forgiveness by Donna Leon

The Temptation of Forgiveness by Donna Leon, April 2018, 300 pages, Hardback, William Heinemann, ISBN: 1785151959

Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

November, Venice
Commissario Guido Brunetti is taking the vaporetto to a morning appointment with his superior, Vice-Questore Patta, at police headquarters. A wall of fog suddenly envelopes the canal, blocking all sight of other traffic. It disperses as suddenly as it appeared and as they emerge into sunlight Brunetti doubts what he has experienced.

Brunetti is equally amazed to receive Patta’s uncharacteristic apologies for a delay. Returning to his own office, he contemplates the thick file on his desk. It is stuffed with car-related crimes, amongst them the latest scam concerning the illegal acquisition of licenses, test results, etc. It is such an ingenious scam that it earns Brunetti's respect and he is considering the file’s fate when he is called back to the Vice-Questore’s presence. Does Brunetti know anything about a leak to the media concerning a suspect brought in for questioning? Scarpa, Patta’s assistant, was given this information by one of his informants. Brunetti shrugs off the matter and manages to score against the ever unpleasant Scarpa by discounting the informant. As he leaves he finds a member of his own team in Patta’s outer office, staring at a computer screen and deep in discussion with Patta’s secretary, Signorina Elettra. Her computer skills are extensive, almost all pervasive – but the information she acquires is now of such service to Brunetti’s investigations that he discounts any uneasiness he might feel over her methods in favour of admiration for her magical skills.

In his office, a woman – one of his wife’s academic colleagues – is waiting for him. It takes all of Brunetti's time and patience to clarify the reason for her visit. Finally she admits that she thinks her son is using drugs. Is this a crime? Her husband says it is impossible that their son who attends a prestigious private school is using drugs. But surely Brunetti can do something? Arrest whoever is selling the drugs? Brunetti explains the legal process of questioning her children and their schoolfriends and the woman realises the social ramifications of her complaint. Leave it, she weeps. Swayed by her tears, Brunetti promises to try and find out more.

About a week later, he is woken in the night by his colleague Claudia Griffoni. A man has been found unconscious, lying at the base of a bridge. He may have been attacked or he may fallen and hit his head on the railing. There are marks on his wrist, the imprints of fingernails. Whichever it is, it looks bad for him. After visiting the possible crime scene, Brunetti arrives at the hospital. Only then does he realise the identity of the victim. It is the husband of his wife’s colleague, the woman who was worried about her son.

Brunetti and colleague Claudia Griffoni investigate what happened to the unconscious man and as they do so they uncover a new turn to the investigation, one that will require all of the pair’s consummate play-acting to unravel a tissue of motives and deception.

THE TEMPTATION OF FORGIVENESS is Donna Leon’s twenty-seventh Commissario Brunetti crime novel. To me Leon remains fresh and thoughtful in this gargantuan series which has seen Brunetti and his family and colleagues age and change just as the city they call their own – Venice – changes and ages. And this novel, rather than being a tale filled with fast action and chases, thunder and lightning, is as formally composed as a piece of chamber music. The investigation of the puzzle of a man found unconscious beneath a Venetian bridge turns into an intimate study of ethics, a study of scams and nuances. It left me with the satisfaction of a mystery unravelled, the experience of eating a beautifully made cannoli and drinking a pleasant glass of wine together with a close observation of human nature and, as ever with Brunetti, food for thought.

Lynn Harvey, June 2018

Review: Beside the Syrian Sea by James Wolff

Beside the Syrian Sea by James Wolff, March 2018, 320 pages, Bitter Lemon Press, ISBN: 1908524987

Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

“The lie was necessary, Tobias,” Jonas said. “It allowed us to establish who you are, what you are. To establish whether you’re the right person to help us with something of huge importance.”
“Us?”

Jonas is 35 years old, a loner working as an analyst in the quieter backwaters of British Intelligence. His personal nightmare erupts when his father, the Reverend Samuel Worth, is taken hostage during an ecumenical mission of support to the Christian Church in Syria. Theirs is not a warm father-son relationship and Jonas is ravaged by guilt at not advising his father better and at allowing their animosities to come between them at what may prove to have been their last contact.

Unable to provoke his employers and the British government to deviate from their policy of refusing to pay ransom demands nor to speak clearly on their progress in negotiating his father’s freedom, Jonas, unkempt and increasingly unruly, begins to foster his own plans. Now, months later and on Special Unpaid Leave which is dismissal by any other name, he has based himself in Beirut.

He has already been visited by Desmond Naseby who introduces himself as a visiting SIS officer on a brief stay in Beirut and anxious to check up on him. How is he is getting on? Would he like to see the latest on the negotiations in his father’s case, blah-di-blah? Naseby looks around the flat on the pretext of “a niece” coming to study in Beirut and wondering about accommodation. Why was Jonas even here? Turkey, Naseby could understand, but Beirut? And people are concerned about Jonas. This isn’t London. And then of course everyone is worried about that Snowden chap, how much damage a USB stick can do. In turn, Jonas wonders what more he could have done to flesh out Naseby’s portrait of him as a useless mess; “no cause for further concern”. An empty vodka bottle would have been a good idea, plenty of glasses lying around.

Jonas has tracked down his own hostage negotiator. Tobias is a Swiss national, a defrocked and alcoholic priest who has acted as a negotiator in the past. Jonas had presented himself to Tobias as a journalist but now he paints himself as the most secret of secret agents on a mission to get a hostage out of Syria. Tobias is distrustful but eventually consents, demanding his own favours by way of payment: a UK visa and safe passage across the border for a Syrian woman. Jonas realises too late it would have been easier if he had laid the truth before Tobias, that the hostage was his own father. But in accepting the price set by Tobias he has raised the stakes on his elaborate trail of deception which will see him pursued and threatened by MI6, the CIA and both ISIS and Hezbollah during his desperate journey to the Syrian border.

We often talk about unlikely heroes but Wolff's compassionate portrait of his protagonist Jonas, in this his first novel, is exceptional. Driven by a dreadful need to put things right and deprived of his own carefully controlled boundaries and routines, Jonas unleashes within himself – to his own utter bewilderment – what he himself calls a "wildness". And it is this wildness, together with a marshalling of his own habitual tics of memory and pattern recognition which provide the engine for his extraordinary attempt to free his father. Wolff's characterisations do not stop there: the Swiss priest Tobias; Maryam, the Syrian woman fiercely loyal to Tobias; the British agent Naseby who, dressed in tennis whites and clutching his wife's offering of a cottage pie, seems to have stepped straight out of Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy. The foul mouthed, lethal, CIA man, Harvey, is a more modern beast – as are the London-grown, street-talking, ISIS kidnappers. Wolff’s range of characters are detailed and convincing and in this beautifully constructed thriller he piles on the pressure to the end.

Sometimes I think that crime novels answer a reader's emotional need for justice to triumph, no matter how rough. Similarly, perhaps spy thrillers allow the reader to indulge a paranoid adrenaline-fuelled flight from the all powerful "they" who are out to get us. Certainly everyone is out to get Jonas and BESIDE THE SYRIAN SEA is a brilliant, gripping and moving thriller.

Lynn Harvey, May 2018

Review: The Mine by Antti Tuomainen tr. David Hackston

The Mine by Antti Tuomainen translated by David Hackston, October 2016, 300 pages, Orenda Books, ISBN: 1910633534

Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

His senses weren’t working the way they usually did. He was too near to the people he had always loved. Up close we cannot see clearly, he remembered someone saying.

A man dies in Helsinki, electrocuted in his bath. Elsewhere in the city a journalist working for Helsinki Today, Janne Vuori, receives an email tipping him off to shady, hazardous practices at a nickel mine in Suomalahti in Northern Finland. With their staff photographer, Janne takes the long trip up north but unsurprisingly the Head of Security at the mine sends them on their way. They don’t even get through the gate.

Back in the city another man is reliving his past by dining in a once favourite restaurant. His thoughts stray to the dead man in the bathtub. And then to another death, that of a man shot-gunned in dazzling southern sunlight.

Suomalahti is a small town with a bank, a supermarket, petrol station, church, optician, hotel, school, cafe. It is not surprising that everyone Janne Vuori asks tells him that “the mine is a good thing”. A site depleted of ore, its current owners Finn Mining Ltd bought it for 2 euros. They announced they would use a new technique – bioleaching, a kind of chemical washing, “proven safe” – which would enable them to salvage the highly commercial nickel. Janne decides to have another nose around but gives the photographer a lift back to the airport. During a frigid phone call with his wife, Janne is reminded that he has forgotten to pay their daughter’s nursery fees. Distance and accusations are filling their marriage with mutual contempt. He is surprised to find the Suomalahti hotel full and sets out for the Casino Hotel seven kilometres further on. In the bar of the Casino Hotel, also filled with mining staff, a drunken man calls out to him: shouldn’t you be on duty tonight? “That shit won’t disappear by itself.” Realising he has mistaken Janne for a work colleague, the drunk apologises but Janne is already heading to his car, snow crunching beneath his feet.

In Helsinki the man reliving past memories contemplates that people’s homes aren’t as inviolate as they think. He considers the people he has followed and how he has slipped into their homes and killed them.

Janne drives along the complex perimeter looking for a way to slip in. He reaches a vast clearing in the forest divided into square sections and notices movement over at the forest edge, arc lights and diggers. He realises that the squares are huge industrial slurry pits smoothed by the snow. The men are digging some kind of canal. He tries to take a photo but his phone has frozen. He heads back to the hotel where, from his room, he spots the shadow of a man in the car park, watching his window; the security chief.

On his return to the city Janne starts researching Finn Mining. The only board member available for interview is the Environmental Officer. Janne is surprised. At their meeting she explains that she is no longer a board member; she has been “promoted” to some vaguely titled post. By the way, did he know that one of the board members died recently? Some kind of domestic accident.

The “hit-man”, for what else can he be, suffers nightmares now. But at least he has found his son …

THE MINE is written through the eyes of two men, a journalist and a killer. There are more deaths, the trail of corruption and environmental threat to investigate and twists of tension as the identity of the hit-man emerges; all embedded in the complicated lives of the lead characters. I read a review on a popular book site which deplored THE MINE because the reviewer didn’t like the lead character. But I tend to congratulate a crime novelist whose characters are human, warts and all – and still you follow them to the book’s end, not just because you are gripping the pages with sweaty, tense palms but because you want to know the end of the story and what happens to its characters.

This is only the second of Tuomainen’s crime novels that I have read. (the first being his glimpse into a dystopic future of climate change and rising waters, THE HEALER) but I intend to read more. An award winning writer, Antti Tuomainen gives each book a fresh take, complex characters, a blend of empathy and objectivity – and above all he is a good story-teller. THE MINE may not be hot off the press but I recommend catching up with it.

Lynn Harvey, April 2018

Review: Holy Ceremony by Harri Nykanen tr. Kristian London

Holy Ceremony by Harri Nykanen translated by Kristian London, March 2018, 268 pages, Bitter Lemon Press, ISBN: 1908524898

Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

“And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

April 2010, Helsinki.
In a spacious apartment in the city’s Töölö district, the body of a naked woman is sprawled on a leather sofa. Her back is covered in writing, quasi religious with bible references and the symbol of a cross inside an arch. Detective Ariel Kafka of the Helsinki Violent Crimes Unit throws his arms in front of his face in an involuntary response to both the writing and a sense of being trapped, then he attempts to distract his surprised colleague Oksanen with a question about the owner of the flat. Scanning the bookshelves for a bible, Kafka finds one. The written reference, Matthew 10:28 has been underlined.
Kafka waits for the medical examiner and as he does so he gets a sense of the apartment as being an elderly person’s home. It reminds him of visiting his aunt’s deathbed all those years ago, a scene which fed his childhood nightmares alongside a scene from “Fiddler on the Roof”. Oksanen returns from talking to the neighbours. The current resident, Reijo Laurén, had inherited the flat three years ago.
The medical examiner’s reaction to the corpse is surprising. It is one he has already examined, the previous day in fact – a suicide and not yet written on. It must have been stolen from the morgue. But the examiner is more interested in the why than the how. He suggests to Kafka that the anonymous tip off about the body is a prelude to something more. Kafka is inclined to agree. A member of Ariel’s team calls in the results of her research into Laurén: one-time musician convicted of narcotics possession, divorced with one child, a restraining order, a year in a psychiatric hospital and employed at a funeral home; Laurén is also a likely candidate for being the dead woman’s unstable boyfriend according to her sister.
The examiner moves the body, revealing an envelope addressed to Kafka. It contains a yellowed newspaper clipping dated 2008, an article about the body of a man found in a Kouvola septic tank. There is also a note written in apocalyptic language which states, amongst other things, that this is not the end of the writer’s work. It is signed “The Adorner of the Sacred Vault”.
Kafka returns to HQ for an update on the dead man in the septic tank. A detective who was on the team investigating the Kouvola case tells him that they ran into dead ends everywhere. They suspected a case of “thieves falling out” and the body had been badly beaten and burned. Kafka asks if there had been anything odd about it. Yes, the symbol of an arch and cross had been inscribed on the dead man’s back.
With this, Kafka gets the go ahead on the stolen body investigation but with absolutely no press involvement. So next day when the case is headline news, he calls the reporter responsible for the story who says he also had an anonymous tip off. Someone is keen to publicise their cause. Kafka and the medical examiner go down to the morgue where the dead woman’s body has been returned. “Here’s our little runaway,” announces the examiner as he pulls out one of the steel drawers. It’s empty again.

HOLY CEREMONY is the third of Harri Nykänen’s books featuring Detective Ariel Kafka to be translated into English (so far five books in all have been published in his native Finland). A well-known crime journalist before turning to fiction, Nykänen’s series of Kafka police procedurals always move at a brisk and steady pace and in HOLY CEREMONY the police team uncover more details of Laurén’s past which includes membership of a religious group, the Brotherhood of the Sacred Vault, at his childhood boarding school and a darker involvement with the school staff. Kafka’s life gets complicated when security records at the morgue implicate the medical examiner himself in the theft of the corpse. The detective and his team race to find Laurén before more people die. But they do.

I like Nykänen’s engaging, mildly eccentric protagonist Ariel Kafka: one of Finland’s two Jewish policemen albeit “a religiously non-observant 40-something bachelor”. I found this book slightly less satisfying than the previous NIGHTS OF AWE and BEHIND GOD’S BACK. Perhaps it is the final grand explanatory reveal (I admit to a preference for a crime novel that “shows” rather than “tells” – which his other books do). But Agatha Christie is no mean example to follow, so I bicker. A great twist of emphasis emerges and the story remains an engaging, conspiratorial mystery, reading well in Kristian London’s translation.

Lynn Harvey, March 2018

Review: The Greek Wall by Nicolas Verdan tr. W Donald Wilson

The Greek Wall by Nicolas Verdan translated by W Donald Wilson, January 2018, 240 pages, Bitter Lemon Press, ISBN: 1908524855

Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

Prologue: It is moonless and dark. A pink neon sign, “Eros”, marks the brothel where the colonel has chosen to meet him. He parks, wondering if here, as well as meeting the colonel, he might be able to put the ghost of his lover to rest. But it is so dark that he cannot even find the building’s entrance. Blundering around he is tripped by, of all things, a line of washing. He stumbles back up onto his feet as a yard light goes on and he sees a young woman approaching. As she gets closer to him, he notices her blank stare. He also realises that she is hefting an axe upon her shoulder. He shouts out, “No! No!” as the axe falls.

Athens, December 2010: Agent Evangelos stands in front of his favourite jazz bar at two in the morning and wonders just what a severed head looks like. The case is his, according to the phone call, so he must leave Athens for the Thrace border – the Evros delta, the Schengen area. Evangelos had said into the phone: “A dead body? So what? They fish dead bodies out of the Evros all the time. Why us?” But it isn’t exactly a dead body. It’s just the head. And not that of a migrant, It’s a Westerner’s head – in Frontex patrolled border country. The job must go to Athens, to the National Intelligence Service.

Evangelos is tired. He is always tired these days. Three years off retirement but with the national debt crisis … what were the chances for his pension? Now he will be facing meetings, reports, dealing with the Turkish authorities, with Frontex. How do you deal with Frontex? They’re headquartered in Warsaw. Evangelos thinks this severed head bodes no good for him. He will be squeezed into a tight place. Told to keep a lid on it. So he heads not to his own home but to the empty house of his dead parents to rest before the flight to Thrace tomorrow afternoon. As he stretches out on the sofa his phone buzzes. His daughter’s child has been born, a girl. Evangelos is a grandfather.

Evangelos stops off to visit the newborn on the way to the airport. He knows that his old colleague and driver will not say anything about the unofficial stop. But today Evangelos cannot help recalling other drivers, silent ones; other meetings, meetings where he was as good as told to ignore the implications of a wealthy businessman, a powerful political donor with past links to the Communist bloc. Put a lid on it Evangelos. And this morning’s meeting? Go there, identify the dead man and … put a lid on it. The border is a problem. But Greece will be building a wall, a barbed wire fence, and then Europe will shut up about Greece’s “inability” to secure its borders. A nurse interrupts Evangelos and his preoccupations. The baby brings a smile to his face...

Set in 2010, THE GREEK WALL bursts into dramatic action in the marshy Evros river country of Greece’s north-eastern border with Turkey. It’s a landscape already patrolled by the European Union Frontex forces despite migration not yet having reached the crisis point that draws the eyes of the outside world. A gruesome murder outside a squalid brothel is the fuse which lights up a mess of corruption, sex-trafficking and politics. And the politics of money cannot be far away: 2010 is crisis time for Greece’s national debt and its struggle with “the Troika” of the European Commission, European Central Bank and the IMF.

Verdan draws on his own journalistic knowledge in lifting the lid off the corrupted stew-pot of contemporary events as seen through the eyes of both Evangelos, a weary intelligence officer, and Nikos, a German-Greek businessman looking to seal an important business deal. Verdan’s observant, fresh, descriptive powers paint the setting of contemporary Greece and its people vividly. If I have any doubts about the story it is in the detailed exploration of the relationship between Nikos and Christine which seems to distract almost from the direct thread of the plot. But as I have remarked before I am a bit of a hard-boiled girl. The plot definitely contains a strong punch of mystery and suspense and its hints of an ambiguous past for Evangelos also gives strong potential for more stories to come. If you like the flavour of contemporary politics in your crime reading (as I do), you will find at THE GREEK WALL a meeting of Europe and Greece seen through Greek eyes, a vantage point I haven’t come across before in a crime thriller. I’d certainly like to read more.

Swiss-Greek journalist and novelist Nicolas Verdan divides his time between Switzerland and Greece. His novels, of which THE GREEK WALL is the first to be published in English, have received awards in both France and Switzerland.

W. Donald Wilson is a Canadian translator several of whose translations have been published by Bitter Lemon Press.

Lynn Harvey, February 2018

Favourite Euro Crime Reads of 2017 - Lynn

Today it's Euro Crime reviewer Lynn's turn to reveal her favourite British/European/translated reads of 2017:

Lynn Harvey's favourite reads of 2017

2017 Top Five
In no particular order I give you my favourite Euro Crime reads of 2017, although I think one or two may have been published earlier.

Donna Leon – Earthly Remains (2017 Heinemann)
Donna Leon was one of my favourite early introductions to "European Crime" and I have always enjoyed her novels featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice police and his wife Paola. In EARTHLY REMAINS Guido has reached crunch point with the system. Burnt out, he is ordered to rest and takes advantage of the chance of some isolation and reading on an island in the Lagoon. But Brunetti is Brunetti and sooner or later there is a death which he feels drawn to investigate. I really enjoyed this novel, its laguna setting and its insight into Brunetti's own past.
Donna Leon still has magic for me.

Frédéric Dard – Crush (2016 Pushkin Vertigo) Translated by Daniel Seton
I have never read Frédéric Dard before. A prolific French crime writer, friend of Simenon, he died in 2000. CRUSH is set in a grim industrial town in Northern France in the 1950s. It tells the story of 17 year old Louise who is fascinated by a wealthy American couple, the Roolands, with their glossy American car and totally alien lifestyle. Her fascination becomes obsession and the novel takes a dark route. A concise but gripping thriller, I read this in one sitting.

Leif GW Persson - The Dying Detective (2017 Black Swan) Translated by Neil Smith
Retired Chief of Police Lars Martin Johansson is in hospital recovering from a stroke when a chance encounter alerts him to a fact concerning an old investigation into the rape and murder of a child. The case's statute of limitations has expired. Nevertheless Johansson becomes determined to solve it. My first Leif Persson crime novel, I shall have to go retrospective.

Kati Hiekkapelto - The Exiled (2017 Orenda) Translated by David Hackston
Hiekkapelto's third "Anna Fekete" crime novel is set in Anna's home village in Northern Serbia rather than Finland. She is on holiday revisiting friends and family when she becomes a victim of a bag-snatch. The incident draws her deeper into an investigation of a death and then deeper into her own past.
I do my travelling in my crime reading and this was a captivating new landscape to explore.

Parker Bilal - Dark Water (2017 Bloomsbury)
I am a Parker Bilal fan, faithfully following the investigations of his Sudanese private eye, Makana, in his adopted country of Egypt. But this time Makana is drawn into an unfamiliar world of espionage as he is persuaded by a mysterious Englishman to escort an Iraqi scientist to safety from his hiding place in Istanbul. It's a case that once again brings Makana into contact with his own painful past.

And a sixth book for luck! And because this has become my "go to" Nordic Noir for Christmas and, yes, it is possible to re-read it and still be spellbound.

Johan Theorin - The Darkest Room (2010 Black Swan) Translated by Marlaine Delargy
Theorin's second novel in his Öland Quartet, Öland being an island off the Swedish coast large enough for its own community and towns but these days primarily home to vacationers and the elderly. Set in a bitterly cold mid-winter, this crime novel tells the stories of Katrine and Joakim who have come with their children to make a new home and renovate an isolated house near two lighthouses on the island's northern coast. Their plans are shattered by a death. What follows is a wonderful Christmas blend of snow, crime and creepiness. I had to add it to this list.

Happy New Year, best wishes and good reading for 2018.

Review: In Dust and Ashes by Anne Holt tr. Anne Bruce

In Dust and Ashes by Anne Holt translated by Anne Bruce, November 2017, 400 pages, Corvus, ISBN: 1782398821

Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

Oslo, Norway: January 2016
Kjell Bonsaksen is looking forward to his retirement from the police and his move to Provence. Squeezing ketchup onto the hot dog, he glances through the window towards the petrol pumps as a man approaches the entrance doors. Their eyes meet and Bonsaksen freezes mid-bite. The man fills his cup at the coffee dispenser and as he passes Bonsaksen, he softly says: “You knew I was innocent. You did nothing.”

Oslo: December 2001
Jonas has continuously recalculated the chronology: if he hadn’t had that extra coffee; if he hadn’t cut his hand and allowed little Dina to bandage it; if he hadn’t fumbled the keys or stopped to sort out the junk mail in the mailbox; those misplaced seconds that led to the fatal timing of a little girl running out into the road and stumbling. He had screamed as he tried to push the wheel of the car from his daughter’s body and he had screamed “My fault” at the bewildered driver, “Mine.”

Oslo: January 2016
Henrik Holme is blocked and jostled by the waiting crowd of journalists as he pushes Hanne’s wheelchair out of the courtroom. Flash photography and shouted questions gradually subside as the journalists examine their phones; the news of the death of Iselin Havorn has pushed the Extremist Trial’s verdict off their agenda.

These days Henrik has his own office and reports to Chief Inspector Sorensen. From seven in the morning until ten at night, he shuttles between this office and his mentor Hanne's apartment, should she need him. Now it is evening and he is staring despondently at his empty in-tray when a burly man darkens the doorway and places an old blue ring-binder on his desk, insisting that Henrik and Hanne look into the case.

Henrik explains that he cannot take a case unless it is referred by the Chief, no matter how much he sympathises over a criminal getting away. The man interrupts, “He didn’t get away,” and tells Henrik that he, Superintendent Bonsaksen, cannot enjoy his retirement until … well. The man was convicted and served time. He never fought the charge of killing his wife. But Bonsaksen always doubted the verdict. When, the other day, he bumped into the man – his eyes were … dead. That man lost everything, Bonsaksen tells Henrik. Jonas Abrahamsen deserves another chance.

Confined to a wheelchair, Hanne Wilhelmsen advises the Oslo police on cold cases from the apartment she shares with her wife and daughter and is assisted by Detective Henrik Holme, a talented but isolated investigator. Hanne is between official cases when she becomes obsessed with the suicide of wealthy businesswoman and blogger Iselin Havorn. Havorn (meaning Sea Eagle) was a successful Marxist-Leninist journalist who, after becoming ill with what she decided was mercury poisoning and electromagnetic sensitivity, had turned towards alternative cures, an alternative lifestyle, conspiracy theories and eventually right-wing nationalism. Her wealth had been founded upon business interests in her wife’s herbal cure company. Recently she became notorious when unmasked as the writer of a virulently racist blog and her sudden death with its suicide note is a media sensation. But Hanne cannot believe that a woman such as Havorn would have killed herself.

Meanwhile Henrik becomes equally concerned by the guilty verdict that convicted Jonas Abrahamsen of the murder of his wife on New Year’s Eve two years after their daughter’s death. The couple were divorcing and Henrik thinks that the traumatised man’s mistake had been to deny visiting his wife on that New Year’s Eve. When Jonas was identified as the figure on the path in the background of a neighbour’s party photograph, with no other suspect in the shooting of his ex-wife, he was convicted. With no fight left in him to appeal, he went to prison for eight years.

Now Henrik and Hanne are at odds with each other. Each is convinced that their cases need investigation, each disagrees with the other’s preoccupation but neither have official permission to investigate. Then everything, it appears, must be put on hold when the child of a national lottery winner is abducted.


IN DUST AND ASHES is described by its publisher as the tenth and “final instalment” in Anne Holt’s “Hanne Wilhelmsen” crime series. An undoubted giant of Nordic crime fiction, Holt has a fine reputation and a host of fans. I have failed to keep up with Hanne since the earlier novels – not following her as a character and the twists, turns and shooting that have led to her confinement to a wheelchair. Nor have I got to know Henrik Holme until now. Therefore I’ll admit to finding the going a bit difficult. The novel unfolds from the working relationship of Hanne and Henrik. Hanne appears to be withdrawing from all social contact other than with Henrik and her family whilst Henrik struggles to modify his compulsive tics and obsessions and to draw closer to “fitting in”. As the plot throws it spotlight on Jonas – it seems as if most of this book’s characters are expressing psychological misery and alienation (with due cause you could say) and this leaves me with the uneasy feeling that Holt has become the queen of bleak. Except for the happy retiree Bonsaksen, whose insistence on re-examining the murder conviction of Jonas provides the impetus for unfolding an ingenious puzzle of a plot.

A thorough police procedural and a tour de force in character study and plotting, IN DUST AND ASHES eventually develops suspense and pace and hurtles towards its ending. But it left me unsure of my feelings about it all. I don’t mind my Nordic Noir being dark but I’m not too sure of almost (and I do say almost) relentlessly bleak.

Lynn Harvey, November 2017

Review: Marked for Life by Emelie Schepp

Marked for Life by Emelie Schepp, June 2017, 384 pages, Paperback, HQ, ISBN: 1848455372

Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

The seven-year-old girl sat in the corner. She pulled at her mama’s skirt and put it over her mouth. She imagined that she was at home in her bed, or rocking in a cradle when the ship rolled in the waves.

Norrköping, Sweden.
When Detective Chief Inspector Levin and Detective Mia Bolander arrive at the house in Östanvägen, an ambulance is in the drive and forensics are already working the scene. In the living room lies the body of a man, Hans Juhlén, head of asylum issues at the Migration Board. His wife found him when she returned from her walk. He had been shot. There are no signs of a struggle but Mrs Juhlén says that a window had been open and she had closed it. Whilst Levin continues to ask the weeping woman questions, the forensics officer dusts the window sill for prints and finds two – the hand prints of a child.

Prosecutor Jana Berzelius promptly leaves the courtroom after the trial verdict. As usual she ignores the waiting journalists and makes her way to the garage. Her cell phone vibrates and she answers her father’s call. He asks how the case went and if she will be coming to the family dinner on the first of May. She accepts the invitation; neutral respect is always the tone of Jana’s and her parents’ conversations. However the next call is not from her mother as she expects but from the Chief Public Prosecutor. An important Migration Board official has been murdered and he wants Jana to assist with the investigation. She drives straight to police headquarters and finds the investigating team already gathered in the conference room. It is clear that detective Mia Bolander is not pleased to see that Jana Berzelius is in charge. Mia dislikes and distrusts her, views her as stiff, upper-class, arrogant and with no idea of how to let her hair down. But Mia seems to be alone in her hostility as the team gets down to work and discusses the time line and crime scene: Mrs Juhlén is a person of interest, a pack of threatening blackmail letters was found in the victim’s wardrobe, the murder weapon hasn’t been found, nor are there any children or grandchildren in the family to explain the child’s prints on the window sill.

In another time and place a young girl huddles with her family and others in a crowded metal container which pitches and rolls with the movement of the ship. She plays her fingers along the steel wall, making them gallop like a horse, but this time Mama doesn’t laugh. Lots of people are crammed into this dark, airless, stinking, space. The little girl knows some of them, some of the children especially. Her galloping fingers find a metal plate on the wall. In the darkness she can just make out letters … V … P and what her mother tells her is an X... O and then some numbers. She counts them. Six numbers...

The strength of Emelie Schepp’s dark crime story about people trafficking is its strong plot centred on prosecutor Jana Berzelius, a clever, elegant and successful woman but a woman with a secret, hidden from even herself until the body of a murdered boy is found. A scarred name marks the back of the child’s neck. Jana too has scars on the back of her neck. Soon her ever-present nightmares begin to change, becoming flashbacks which set her in pursuit of the boy’s killer in tandem with the police investigation – but for reasons of her own.

The story of MARKED FOR LIFE is strong and striking and begs to be filmed. Perhaps that’s what its author might have hoped for – for I found the actual writing flawed. Odd turns of phrase and grammar sat badly with me, sometimes even getting in the way of the action. No translator is credited with this English language version. The characterisation is also thin, with the exception of Jana herself and her distorted mirror image, the unlikeable police detective Mia Bolander who looms large. I ended up feeling as though I was viewing a dark and fascinating story through an equally dark glass.

Emelie Schepp’s début novel, MARKED FOR LIFE started out as self-published. It would have been good if a sympathetic editor had taken it under their wing. However it has attracted favourable community reviews and Swedish 2016 Specsavers Crime Time Reader’s Prize. For fans, the good news is that Emelie Schepp has written a further two novels in her Jana Berzelius series which are due to be published over the next two years.

I remain some kind of grouch in saying that, for me, this novel was an uneven read except for its original and absorbing plot.

Lynn Harvey, August 2017

Review: Earthly Remains by Donna Leon

Earthly Remains by Donna Leon, April 2017, 320 pages, Hardback, William Heinemann, ISBN: 1785151355

Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

As the canal narrowed, they saw spoonbills ahead of them, waving their beaks from side to side in the mud as they searched for food. Instinctively the two men pulled in their oars and approached the birds silently, but one of them must have made a motion, for the two birds took wing and were gone in an instant.

Police headquarters, Venice.
The interview of a wealthy suspect – whether or not he gave pills to a young girl at a party – is being conducted in stifling heat. The girl subsequently died in hospital but that doesn’t seem to disturb their suspect. Commissario Brunetti hides his growing repugnance but is increasingly aware of officer Pucetti seated next to him, and of his reactions. What happens next is hard to describe but it is a pivotal point, an impetuous action or set of impetuous actions, starting with Brunetti shooting out his arm, groaning and then collapsing to the floor of the interview room.

In hospital later, Brunetti cannot tell whether his action had been a stalling device to protect a young man’s police career or a genuine medical crisis. But there is no doubting its effect on his wife Paola when she arrives at his bedside, leans close and demands, “What have you done now?” As Brunetti explains he comes to a realisation: that he is going to use the incident to step away from his police work and the stress of protecting himself and his staff from its psychological toll. Nevertheless he is uneasy when the hospital doctor agrees that two or three weeks break from his job is necessary. Now Paola and Brunetti must decide where he can obtain isolation and the image of rowing on the Laguna, as he had as a young man, comes to Brunetti. Paola reminds him of her family’s open invitation to stay at a relative’s small villa on the island of Sant ‘Erasmo. No children, no Paola; just Brunetti, the villa, its caretaker family and days of reading, rowing, eating and sleeping. At Police Headquarters, Brunetti’s frequently-used charade of feeble uselessness works well once more on his boss Patta. So, with a rigorously small suitcase packed with T-shirts, old jeans and his beloved Greek and Latin writings, Brunetti takes the ferry to the island of Sant ‘Erasmo where he is met by the caretaker Davide Casati and settled into the villa.

The following days accompanying Casati as he rows amongst the marshy islets and narrow tidal canals of the Laguna to check his beehives bring a kind of peace to Brunetti. They also put him in touch with his own past for Casati had known and rowed with Brunetti’s father. But Brunetti can also see that Casati is worried by something and oppressed by a sense of guilt. One hot day a fierce and sudden storm blows in whilst Brunetti is out cycling. Drenched, he manages to get back to the villa but next morning Casati’s daughter reports that her father did not return from rowing on the Laguna the day before.

An anxious and difficult search ends with finding Davide’s drowned body, floating beneath his upturned boat, his leg wrapped in the anchor rope. The death of this newfound friend haunts Brunetti and he cannot help but be drawn back searching for the truth of Casati’s death and the truth of his past.

With her Commissario Guido Brunetti books, American-born author Donna Leon has created a classic and long-running crime series; one that is not only enduring but is a detailed chronicle of Leon’s beloved Venice and a careful portrait of a marriage between classics-loving policeman Brunetti and his English Literature professor wife Paola. Followers of the series have got to know their two children, to sit at their table, eat their food and drink their wine. Brunetti's colleagues are equally familiar and established. Yet it is always possible to jump into individual books on their own terms. Donna Leon’s fine juggling act with the series’ back story adds richness and familiarity without rendering each novel indecipherable without knowledge of the previous one.

EARTHLY REMAINS itself reads as freshly and thoughtfully about contemporary life in Venice and the lives of its characters as earlier novels in the series. Brunetti has grown older and perhaps darker in his thoughts but Leon takes him away from the tourist-packed bridges and alleys of Venice and out into the city’s own setting, The Laguna. Painstaking pictures of each encounter with people, birds, islands and islets, ruined farm and villa, mirror the breadth and subtlety of Leon’s cool eye – despite writing, one feels, out of a personal passion about an environment and way of life rapidly disappearing. In EARTHLY REMAINS it seems as if this pause for a long cool look is what Brunetti himself may need in order to reconnect with his original passion for justice. Yes, good fortune smiles on him in the form of a wonderful place to recuperate, thanks to his wife’s wealthy family, and the almost supernatural cyber powers of the ever elegant Signorina Elettra coming to the rescue once again during the course of Brunetti’s investigation into Casati’s past. But a little bit of fortuitous escapism is necessary. Something needs to go right amidst a wider world of corruption, pollution, greed and personal tragedy where, as Leon has said of the current American administration vis-à-vis environmental protection – the foxes have been put in the hen coop.

Donna Leon is a marathon runner when it comes to crime series and in EARTHLY REMAINS, the twenty-sixth in her Guido Brunetti series, Donna Leon remains in peak form.

Lynn Harvey, July 2017