This week’s mystery books offerings are quite worldly. Choose to solve crime in Sweden, the United States, southern England, northern Ireland, or Japan. Wherever you want to travel this summer — there’s a book for that.
The Nightmare by Lars Kepler
The follow up to the wildly successful debut thriller The Hypnotist. Stockholm police recover the body of a young woman from an abandoned pleasure boat. Her lungs are filled with brackish water, and the forensics team is sure that she drowned. Why, then, are there no traces of water on her clothes or body? The next day, a man turns up dead in his state apartment, hanging from a lamphook in the ceiling. All signs point to suicide, but the room has a high ceiling, and there’s not a single piece of furniture around. Joona Linna begins to piece together the two mysteries, but the logistics are a mere prelude to a dizzying and dangerous course of events.
Criminal: A Novel by Karin Slaughter
Will Trent is a brilliant agent who’s beginning to put a difficult past behind him. Then a local college student goes missing, and Will is inexplicably kept off the case by his supervisor and mentor, Amanda Wagner. Now the case that launched Amanda’s career has suddenly come back to life, and it is intertwined with the long-held mystery of Will’s birth and parentage. They will each need to face down demons from the past if they are to prevent an even greater terror from being unleashed.
The Betrayal of Trust by Susan Hill
“The sixth book in the superb Simon Serrailler series is the best so far and that makes it a standout. If we’re looking for writers to join P. D. James and Ruth Rendell in the pantheon of Britain’s best, Hill is definitely on the list. She has plot, character, setting and mood in perfect position: The Betrayal of Trust shows just what she can do with all of them.”
—Margaret Cannon, The Globe and Mail
The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville
Fegan has been a “hard man,” an IRA killer in northern Ireland. Now that peace has come, he is being haunted day and night by twelve ghosts: a mother and infant, a schoolboy, a butcher, an RUC constable, and seven other of his innocent victims. In order to appease them, he’s going to have to kill the men who gave him orders.
Pro Bono by Seicho Matsumoto
When Kiriko Yanagida first came to Otsuka’s law offices, she had only a familial conviction of her brother’s innocence despite his confessing to the murder. To the high-profile (and high priced) lawyer Otsuka, this small-town girl’s belief was nothing more than naive hope, so he sent her away, advising her to find a local lawyer or something. Now, Kiriko plots to avenge her brother — entirely pro bono.
