Jo Nesbo's police detective Harry Hole is synonymous with Oslo at this point, but his first two Hole novels had rather more exotic settings. The Bat (first published in Norwegian in 1997) was set in Sydney, Australia; its sequel, Cockroaches (Harvill Secker, €15.99), which was first published in Norwegian in 1998 and is now translated into English, plays out in Bangkok.
A Norwegian diplomat in Thailand has been found dead in suspicious circumstances, and the authorities in Oslo wish the lurid details – such as the fact that the diplomat’s body was discovered by a prostitute – to be swept under the carpet.
A media favourite after his success in Sydney, but considered by his superiors to be a biddable alcoholic, Hole is the ideal candidate to be dispatched to a sweltering Bangkok to clean up the mess. The plotting here is a little cruder, or at least more conventional, than Nesbo’s more recent fans have come to expect, and there’s less of an emphasis on the psychological exploration of the criminal mind that has hugely contributed to Nesbo’s appeal. That said, it’s a fast-paced mystery that boasts a fabulously sordid setting, with the added bonus of tracking the early development of a character who is now an icon of the genre.
John Lawton is best known for his historical spy novels featuring Frederick Troy, the most recent of which was A Lily of the Field (2010), but Then We Take Berlin (Grove Press, €18.75) is a standalone title that follows Cockney thief John Holderness through his formative years as a teenager in London's East End during the second World War and on to his experiences of a divided Berlin in the postwar years. Holderness, essentially, is MI6's in-house cat burglar, but as the Cold War deepens and fragile alliances fracture and snap, Holderness comes to realise he is a pawn in a complex game with very few rules. The story moves from London to Berlin and on to New York, a layered tale that juxtaposes the experience of the victor with that of the defeated and blends the perspectives of the military, the civilian and, hauntingly, the survivors of the concentration camps. Leonard Cohen fans will appreciate the wit in calling the novel's first section "First We Take Manhattan"; while Lawton's previous novels were distinguished by their precise and elegant prose, Then We Take Berlin offers, courtesy of its Cockney protagonist, a cruder but equally effective vernacular style underpinned by mordant black humour.
Sophie Loubiere's The Stone Boy (Trapdoor, €11.50) won the Prix Lion Noir in her native France when it was first published in 2011. The story opens in 1946, with the young Elsa announcing at the dinner table that she has seen her mother again, despite the fact that her mother is dead. Decades later, the young Elsa has grown up to become a grandmother, the venerable Madame Préau, now living alone and concerned about a child in the family that has recently moved into her neighbourhood. Is the child – the "stone boy" – a victim of abuse? Is Elsa's febrile and possibly senile imagination playing tricks on her? Or is something more sinister entirely at play? Translated in a deliciously forthright style by Nora Mahony, The Stone Boy mischievously toys with the reader's expectations, blending elements from the traditional mystery tale with those of the paranormal, while also offering a bracing critique of contemporary French attitudes to investigations into child abuse. The irascible and irrepressible Madame Préau makes for a delightfully ambiguous protagonist, and Loubiere deftly plots a compelling tale that is as poignantly heartbreaking as it is thrilling.
The Memory Key (Bloomsbury, €17.25) by Conor Fitzgerald is the fourth novel to feature Commissioner Alec Blume, a Rome-based police detective who was born and raised in America but who has since become a naturalised Italian. The combination offers a variation on the crime novel's classic protagonist, the insider with an outsider's cynical gaze, and Blume's cynicism is here more than justified by the labyrinthine nature of Italian policing, particularly when grasping politicians get involved.
Blume finds himself investigating the death of a young student, Sofia Fontana, who has apparently been shot dead by a sniper; that investigation leads him to a previous shooting in virtually the same place, when another woman, a former terrorist who was partly responsible for the lethal bombing of a train station in the 1970s, was also shot by a sniper. It’s impossible that both cases aren’t connected, but it’s the whys and hows that occupy Blume. Fitzgerald’s terse but lyrical style is perfectly suited to evoking the poisonously claustrophobic atmosphere in which Blume operates, and contributes handsomely to an excellent police procedural.
Conor Brady made his debut as a historical crime novelist with A June of Ordinary Murders (2011), and that novel's hero, Det Sgt Joe Swallow of the Dublin Metropolitan Police "G-Men" Division, makes a welcome return in The Eloquence of the Dead (New Island, €16.99). The novel opens in Galway in 1887, with Lady Gessel bidding a none-too-fond farewell to her estate as she prepares to sell her family's ancestral home, as so many of her peers are doing, and move to England.
Back in Dublin, Swallow is called in to investigate the murder of a pawnbroker in the Liberties, a man who appears to have paid a very harsh price for handling stolen goods. How these events are connected gradually emerges in a propulsive but stylish tale of conspiracy and corruption on a grand scale. Swallow, a keen amateur painter, brings a sharp eye to bear on his surroundings, which in turn allows Brady to give us a vivid account of late Victorian Dublin in all its squalid glory. The result is a very satisfying police procedural / mystery and an equally fine historical novel.
