English Translations of Scandinavian/Nordic Mysteries & Thrillers discussion

For the month of August 2021 we have Six books to choose from to read, they are:

1) The Night Singer by Johanna Mo to be published 3rd August 2021. Sweden (England and Denmark).

The scars from a family tragedy draw an estranged police detective back to her childhood home as a teenage boy's death quickly causes the past to collide with the present.

Police detective Hannah Duncker didn't expect to return to her native land. She fled after her father's murder conviction and returns to make peace with her shame. She has a new job with the local police and a nosy new partner. A fifteen-year-old's death catapults her into a murder investigation that resurrects ghosts from her previous life. As she hunts for the truth, she must confront the people she abandoned. Not all are pleased to see her back home, and she soon learns that digging through the past comes with consequences.

Author Johanna Mo crafts a breakneck island noir where secrets linger, guilt stains, and collective memory is long and unforgiving. Propulsive and poignant, The Night Singer explores the fallout of when good people do bad things.

2) The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World by Arthur Herman to be published 3rd August 2021. Viking.

“A stirring investigation of the Scandinavian influence on our times, both past and present. You won’t look at the world the same way again.”—Neal Bascomb, New York Times best-selling author of The Winter Fortress

From a New York Times best-selling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist, a sweeping epic of how the Vikings and their descendants have shaped history and America

Scandinavia has always been a world apart. For millennia Norwegians, Danes, Finns, and Swedes lived a remote and rugged existence among the fjords and peaks of the land of the midnight sun. But when they finally left their homeland in search of opportunity, these wanderers—including the most famous, the Vikings—would reshape Europe and beyond. Their ingenuity, daring, resiliency, and loyalty to family and community would propel them to the gates of Rome, the steppes of Russia, the courts of Constantinople, and the castles of England and Ireland. But nowhere would they leave a deeper mark than across the Atlantic, where the Vikings’ legacy would become the American Dream.

In The Viking Heart, Arthur Herman melds a compelling historical narrative with cutting-edge archaeological and DNA research to trace the epic story of this remarkable and diverse people. He shows how the Scandinavian experience has universal meaning, and how we can still be inspired by their indomitable spirit.

3) The Chinese Twin by Sarah Engell to be published 5th August 2021. Denmark.

A buried corpse disappears. A child is kidnapped. A woman suddenly vanishes. The only clue - mysterious Chinese symbols; left behind at each of the crime scenes in a provincial town in Northern Denmark.

In the eye of the storm is Eva. After suffering a deeply sorrowful tragedy - where her long-awaited daughter is stillborn - Eva is fighting to get her life back on track together with her husband who recently, and inexplicably, became paralyzed and is now unable to take care of himself. In an attempt to escape her grief, Eva embarks on her own investigation to find out who is behind these violent crimes. And why. It turns out, the past will play a chilling and completely unexpected role...

'The Chinese Twin' is Sarah Engell's captivating, best-selling thriller bringing together past secrets, lies and heinous crimes in a shocking culmination.

4) My Name Is Jensen by Heidi Amsinck to be published 5th August 2021. Denmark.

Guilty. One word on a beggar’s cardboard sign. And now he is dead, stabbed in a wintry Copenhagen street, the second homeless victim in as many weeks. Dagbladet reporter Jensen, stumbling across the body on her way to work, calls her ex lover DI Henrik Jungersen. As, inevitably, old passions are rekindled, so are old regrets, and that is just the start of Jensen’s troubles. The front page is an open goal, but nothing feels right….. When a third body turns up, it seems certain that a serial killer is on the loose. But why pick on the homeless? And is the link to an old murder case just a coincidence? With her teenage apprentice Gustav, Jensen soon finds herself putting everything on the line to discover exactly who is guilty …

5) Hell and High Water by Christian Unge to be published 19th August 2021. Sweden.

The first in a new Swedish crime series featuring Tekla Berg, a fearless doctor with a remarkable photographic memory


With 85% per cent burns to his body and a 115% risk of dying, it's a miracle the patient
is still alive.

He only made it this far thanks to Tekla Berg, an emergency physician whose unorthodox methods and photographic memory are often the difference between life and death.

Convinced that the fire was a terrorist attack - and that the patient was involved - the police are determined to question him. Almost as determined as those who would silence him at any cost. And while Tekla battles to keep him breathing, she can't shake the thought that something about him is strangely familiar . . .

Tekla has always hidden her remarkable mind from her hospital colleagues, resorting to amphetamines to take the edge off the endless whirl of lucid memories. But now she'll need to call on all her wits as she's drawn into a mystery involving corrupt police, the godfather of the Uzbek mafia, and her beloved but wayward brother.

Translated from the Swedish by George Goulding.

6) The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women by Nancy Marie Brown to be published 31st August 2021. Viking.

In the tradition of Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra, Brown lays to rest the hoary myth that Viking society was ruled by men and celebrates the dramatic lives of female Viking warriors.

In 2017, DNA tests revealed to the collective shock of many scholars that a Viking warrior in a high-status grave in Birka, Sweden was actually a woman. The Real Valkyrie weaves together archaeology, history, and literature to imagine her life and times, showing that Viking women had more power and agency than historians have imagined.

Brown uses science to link the Birka warrior, whom she names Hervor, to Viking trading towns and to their great trade route east to Byzantium and beyond. She imagines her life intersecting with larger-than-life but real women, including Queen Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings, the Viking leader known as The Red Girl, and Queen Olga of Kyiv. Hervor’s short, dramatic life shows that much of what we have taken as truth about women in the Viking Age is based not on data, but on nineteenth-century Victorian biases. Rather than holding the household keys, Viking women in history, law, saga, poetry, and myth carry weapons. These women brag, “As heroes we were widely known—with keen spears we cut blood from bone.” In this compelling narrative Brown brings the world of those valkyries and shield-maids to vivid life.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>We will add books as the become known to us during August 2021. Good Reading.

Hi Ken. Sorry I don't know how this works. Do we choose one individually and read it?

I would be reading all the time. Just pick one or two to read.

How do you select the books? I can't find a nomination thread or poll.

=)

Nike wrote: "How do you select the books? I can't find a nomination thread or poll.

=)"

All the books are found by using Amazon, Goodreads, NetGalley, Edelweiss+, and BookSirens. I'm on all of them daily and only look for the Scandinavian books. I only use the books which are for that month.

I think I didn't express myself clearly. I wonder how the group choose the monthly group reads? Or do you mean that it is only you that pick them out from the websites mentioned above? I thought that their was a nomination - and voting system here as well as in other groups. (Not that I mind if it's only one admin who does, not at all. I'm just a bit confused.)

Nike wrote: "I think I didn't express myself clearly. I wonder how the group choose the monthly group reads? Or do you mean that it is only you that pick them out from the websites mentioned above? I thought th..."

My impression is that the admin. lists books that become available during the current month. So, you can read any or all of them.

After the Sun by Jonas Eika to be published 24th of August 2021. Denmark.

From a major new international voice, mesmerizing, inventive fiction that probes the tender places where human longings push through the cracks of a breaking world.

Under Canc�n's hard blue sky, a beach boy provides a canvas for tourists' desires, seeing deep into the world's underbelly. An enigmatic encounter in Copenhagen takes an IT consultant down a rabbit hole of speculation that proves more seductive than sex. The collapse of a love triangle in London leads to a dangerous, hypnotic addiction. In the Nevada desert, a grieving man tries to merge with an unearthly machine.

After the Sun opens portals to our newest realities, haunting the margins of a globalized world that's both saturated with yearning and brutally transactional. Infused with an irrepressible urgency, Eika's fiction seems to have conjured these far-flung characters and their encounters in a single breath. Juxtaposing startling beauty with grotesquery, balancing the hyperrealistic with the fantastical--"as though the worlds he describes are being viewed through an ultraviolet filter," in one Danish reviewer's words--he has invented new modes of storytelling for an era when the old ones no longer suffice.

Diana wrote: "Nike wrote: "I think I didn't express myself clearly. I wonder how the group choose the monthly group reads? Or do you mean that it is only you that pick them out from the websites mentioned above?..."

Thank you, very much =)

Diana wrote: "Nike wrote: "I think I didn't express myself clearly. I wonder how the group choose the monthly group reads? Or do you mean that it is only you that pick them out from the websites mentioned above?..."

And find out about lots you may have missed otherwise. Always possible to suggest a book to others.