Entries from Westport Public Library BOOK blog tagged with 'international'
Death on a train
The phenomenal success of the Phryne Fisher series is no doubt due in part to author Kerry Greenwood’s vision of her character: “Phryne is a hero, just like James Bond or the Saint, but with fewer product endorsements and a better class of lovers. I decided to try a female hero and made her as free as a male hero, to see what she would do. Mind you, at that time I only thought there would be two books.”Next Sunday, the 29th, at 2 p.m., the Usual Suspects Mystery Reading Group will be discussing the 3rd book in the series, Murder on the Ballarat Train.The Indy Five
The 40th Bouchercon World Mystery Convention will be held in Indianapolis, Indiana, October 15 - 18, 2009. Author Michael Connelly will be the Guest of Honor. The Anthony Awards, named in memory of mystery writer and critic Anthony Boucher, will be given out at a ceremony on Saturday, October 17. The five Best Novel nominees are Trigger City by Sean Chercover, The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly, Red Knife by William Kent Krueger, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson and The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny. The Cruelest Month has already won this year’s Agatha Award for Best Novel and is nominated for the McAvity and the Barry awards as well as the Anthony. Louise Penny is an author that I suggest to readers often and they never come back to me disappointed. The New York Times attributes this success to the “elegance and depth” that she brings to her traditional village mysteries.Playing Clue in Bollywood
Vikas Swarup, the author of Q&A, the novel that became the critically acclaimed film Slumdog Millionaire, has turned to writing crime fiction. Janet Maslin of the New York Times calls his second novel, Six Suspects, "a Bollywood version of the board game Clue with a strain of screwball comedy thrown in" and adds “the whole thing feels handily confined to the kind of isolated, air-tight setting that Agatha Christie’s readers love.” In a starred review Booklist said “If Agatha Christie wrote a mystery about modern India, it might be something like this.”The Sterling standard
What am I bid on another fine "antiques mystery" series? Sterling Glass is a small-town Virginia antiques appraiser. In Stealing with Style, her first case, she becomes embroiled in a plot involving several prestigious families, valuable antiques, and con men at some of New York's leading auction houses when a number of rare objects show up in a Goodwill store. The Library Journal review called it "a fascinating look at the world of antiques” which is probably due to the fact that its author, Emyl Jenkins, is a longtime antiques appraiser and has written numerous popular books on the subject.Mystery solved
What to buy … what to buy? If you cannot find just the right thing for that mystery lover on your gift list, come on over to the Library and check out the holiday issue of Mystery Scene magazine – the one with author Donna Andrews on the cover. It features a delightful gift guide that includes gift ideas ranging from items of apparel such as The Three Stooges detective tie ($14.95) to pretend private detective badges ($4.99) and birdhouses hand-crafted from vintage copies of To Kill a Mockingbird ($114.95) as well as a selection of interactive detective games, DVDs and special edition books sure to please every taste.An Unsuitable Job for a Woman?
The Usual Suspects Mystery Reading Group will be exploring the role of woman as detective in a two-book discussion series, “An Unsuitable Job for a Woman?” The first book, being discussed next Sunday at 2 p.m., is The Friend of Madame Maigret by Georges Simenon. Maigret attempts to prove that a murder has actually been committed without a corpse and he begins to suspect that his wife’s earlier strange encounter with a woman and her baby may hold the key. Although Maigret is a police professional and Madame Maigret is a stay-at-home wife they often work together as a team. According to the official Maigret website, “Mme Maigret provides the calm balance to Maigret's hectic working life … Her female insights are invaluable to Maigret and her wise answers to his apparently innocuous questions often help him with his cases.”Animalistic behavior
There have always been a host of canine and feline mysteries to keep animal-loving readers occupied. There are two new zookeeper detectives of note.
In Betty Webb’s forthcoming Anteater of Death, Lucy, a pregnant giant anteater from Belize, is blamed for killing the man found dead in her pen. California zookeeper Teddy Bentley must find the real culprit before Lucy is shipped to another zoo. Teddy's search puts her at odds with her boss, a lecherous zoo administrator, and many of the local residents resent her “nosing” around. In Marilyn Victor and Michael Allan Mallory’s Death Roll, zookeeper Lavender "Snake" Jones and her husband Jeff – an Australian herpetologist who bears a striking resemblance to the late crocodile hunter Steve Irwin – investigate when the director of the Minnesota Valley Zoo ends up as a crocodile snack.The City of Light
Murder on The Eiffel Tower is the first in a promising new series from Claude Izner. Izner is a pseudonym for sisters and Parisian booksellers Liliane Korb and Laurence Lefèvre. The brand-new, shiny Eiffel Tower is the pride and glory of the 1889 World Exposition. But one sunny afternoon, as visitors are crowding the viewing platforms, a woman collapses and dies on this great Paris landmark. Can a bee sting really be the cause of death? Or is there a more sinister explanation? Young bookseller Victor Legris witnesses the woman’s death. Appalled by the media coverage of the event, he is determined to find out what actually happened and is caught in a race against time when there are more mysterious deaths.Beach reads
Last Wednesday night I was at Borders in Fairfield for a panel of authors -- several being mystery writers -- who shared their favorite beach reads.Place your bets
Abdelilah Hamdouchi’s The Final Bet, which takes place in modern-day Casablanca, is the first Arabic detective novel to be translated into English. Othman is an unemployed 32-year-old Moroccan man married to a wealthy 73-year-old French woman who has pampered him with fancy cars and expensive clothes. When his wife is murdered the police zero in on Othman as the prime suspect. He has been involved in a steamy affair with an attractive young aerobics instructor. But is he guilty? Did he kill his wife for the money and his lover? Or is he an innocent man, framed by circumstance—and an overzealous and brutal police force?Double indemnity re-defined
As an addendum to Monday’s posting about the pseudonyms of mystery writing literary authors, I just encountered a problem with a new book from a “new” author named Inger Ash Wolfe – which the book jacket says “is the pseudonym for a North American literary novelist.” I did a quick Google to see if I could solve the mystery of her true identity and found out that there is quite a flap in the book world over the name because it turns out there is already a Danish mystery writer named Inger Wolf – no “e” at the end. Several of the major blogs are abuzz about it. If you want to join the fray, check out Scrivener's Error and Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.A classy case of mistaken identity
Acclaimed Irish novelist and journalist – and Man Booker Prize winner – John Banville is better known to mystery fans as his noir writing alter-ego Benjamin Black. His two mystery novels to date, Christine Falls and the recently released The Silver Swan are darkly set in 1950s Dublin and both feature pathologist-cum-detective Garret Quirke. Sarah Dunant, author of many international literary fiction bestsellers, including The Birth of Venus and In the Company of the Courtesan, is also a writer of hard-boiled detective fiction. Her character, Hannah Wolfe, is a private investigator in London.Abrupt endings
Fans of the international crime novel are mourning the passing of three significant writers in the genre. Magdalen Nabb was the author of the Marshal Salvatore Guarnaccia novels, which are set in modern day Florence. Another author of what has been called the “renaissance of Italian crime fiction,” Michael Dibdin, gave us Aurelio Zen, one of the quirkiest detectives in all of crime fiction. The late Batya Gur’s groundbreaking Chief Inspector Michael Ohayon mysteries took us across the Mediterranean to Jerusalem.Chiller thriller
On Sunday, February 17th, at 2 p.m. the Usual Suspects Mystery Reading group will discuss Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg, which has been called a stunning intellectual thriller in the tradition of Gorky Park and the novels of John Le Carré. Smilla Jaspersen is the daughter of a Danish doctor and an Inuit woman from Greenland who lives in Copenhagen. When an Inuit boy she knows dies under mysterious circumstances, she refuses to believe it was an accident. She decides to investigate and discovers that even the police don't want her involved. Smilla persists, and her investigation leads her from a fanatically religious accountant to a tough-talking pathologist and then to the secret files of the Danish company responsible for extracting most of Greenland's mineral wealth. Finally, she boards a ship with an international cast of villains laden with a large stash of cocaine bound for a mysterious mission on an inhospitable island off Greenland.In the dead of winter
It is not even officially winter yet, and I don't know about you, but I have already used up all of my bad weather driving nerves. A few hearty souls made their way in on Sunday to join me for the Usual Suspects discussion of Ngaio Marsh's Tied up in Tinsel. I don't know what I was thinking when I came up with the "In the Dead of Winter" theme for our January and February books. I should have come up with something tropical. On Sunday, January 20th, at 2 p.m. we will be discussing Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon.Fall book discussions
The Usual Suspects Mystery Reading Group has two award winners up for discussion this fall.
This coming Sunday, September 16th, at 2 p.m. our title will be The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin, which was the winner of the this year's Edgar Award for Best Novel.
On Sunday, October 21st our title will be The Virgin of Small Plains by Nancy Pickard, which was the winner of this year's Agatha Award for Best Novel.
Crime in the City
If you missed NPR’s recent Crime in the City series featuring four of today’s hottest mystery authors giving guided tours of the places they and their characters inhabit, the good news is that you can play them on-line.
Red, Black, and Blue
Leonardo Padura is the internationally acclaimed author of several novels including the Havana Quartet, a series of detective stories featuring police inspector Mario Conde, who has been called “a tropical Marlowe.”
Havana Red, Havana Black, and, most recently, Havana Blue, have made their way onto our shelves. The fourth title, Havana Yellow, is expected next year.
Padura describes his books as detective stories with “social character” growing out of his need to “leave behind a mark of an historical moment that we lived through in Cuba and, more specifically, the feeling of disillusionment when the ideal world which they spoke of began to disappear.” Therefore, “they are also sad.”
And the winner is …
The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin is the winner of the 2007 Edgar Award for best novel.
The New York Times review called it “the perfect escapist mystery.”
It is set in 1836 during the Ottoman Empire's declining decades. Just before the Sultan announces sweeping modernizations, a wave of murders threatens the fragile balance of power in his court.
For 400 years the Janissaries were the empire's elite soldiers, but they grew too powerful, and ten years ago the Sultan had them crushed. Are the Janissaries staging a brutal comeback?
The investigation is in the hands of a court eunuch, Yashim Togalu, who is of the opinion that he is the perfect man for the job as he is “unencumbered by the plums.”
Crime and Punishment, continued
In The Gentle Axe, R.N. Morris has picked up police magistrate Porfiry Petrovich’s career where Dostoevsky left off.
Two dead bodies in St. Petersburg’s Petrovsky Park. A big, burly man hanging from a tree with a bloodied axe tucked into his belt and a dwarf packed inside of a suitcase with a deep axe wound in his head.
Petrovich soon has reason to reject the obvious explanation that one man killed the other and then hanged himself.
Truth is stranger than fiction
According to Mark Twain, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
Two non-fiction true crime books passed through my hands recently that gave me reason to reflect upon this.
One is Stealing Lincoln’s Body by Thomas J. Craughwell, which is about an incident in 1876 involving several Chicago counterfeiters who attempted to steal Lincoln’s remains from his Springfield tomb. As a result, our 16th president now rests below several feet of cement.
Bologna and cheese?
Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen has returned in Back to Bologna, his 10th mystery.
The ever-cynical, brooding detective investigates the murder of a millionaire entrepreneur who is found in his car impaled on a parmesan cheese knife.
North Korea, hard-boiled
In a starred Publishers Weekly review James Church’s A Corpse in the Koryo is heralded as “an impressive debut that calls to mind such mystery thrillers as Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park.”
Against the backdrop of totalitarian North Korea, Police Inspector O is called in when the government becomes desperate to hunt down and eliminate anyone who knows too much about a series of decades-old kidnappings and murders.
Iceland and Sweden are hot, hot, hot!
No, not global warming! Outstanding mysteries set in Reykjavik, the cosmopolitan capital of Iceland, and Ystad, a small town in the wind-lashed Swedish province of Skane.
Arnaldur Indridason’s second Inspector Erlandur Sveinsson mystery Silence of the Grave is expected in October. Erlandur was first introduced to us in Jar City (2005).
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