English Translations of Scandinavian/Nordic Mysteries & Thrillers discussion

For the month of January 2022 we have five books to read. We will add books as they become known to us. Good reading. The books for January 2022 are:

1) NOT UNTIL MARCH 1, 2022. Girl in Ice by Erica Ferencik to be published on the 4th of January 2022. Now it says that it won't be published until the 1st of March 2022. Greenland.

From the author of The River at Night and Into the Jungle comes a harrowing new thriller set in the unforgiving landscape of the Arctic Circle, as a brilliant linguist struggling to understand the apparent suicide of her twin brother ventures hundreds of miles north to try to communicate with a young girl who has thawed from the ice alive.

Valerie “Val” Chesterfield is a linguist trained in the most esoteric of disciplines: dead Nordic languages. Despite her successful career, she leads a sheltered life and languishes in the shadow of her twin brother Andy, an accomplished climate scientist stationed on a remote island off Greenland’s barren coast. But Andy is gone: a victim of suicide, having willfully ventured unprotected into 50 degree below zero weather. Val is inconsolable—and disbelieving. She suspects foul play.

When Wyatt, Andy’s fellow researcher in the Arctic, discovers a scientific impossibility­—a young girl frozen in the ice who thaws out alive, speaking a language no one understands—Val is his first call. Will she travel to the frozen North and meet this girl, try to comprehend what she is so passionately trying to communicate? Under the auspices of helping Wyatt interpret the girl’s speech, Val musters every ounce of her courage and journeys to the Artic to solve the mystery of her brother’s death.

The moment she steps off the plane, her fear threatens to overwhelm her. The landscape is fierce, and Wyatt, brilliant but difficult, is an enigma. But the girl is special, and Val’s connection with her is profound. Only something is terribly wrong; the child is sick, maybe dying, and the key to saving her lies in discovering the truth about Wyatt’s research. Can his data be trusted? And does it have anything to do with how and why Val’s brother died? With time running out, Val embarks on an incredible frozen odyssey—led by the unlikeliest of guides—to rescue the new family she has found in the most unexpected of places.

2) Son of Svea by Lena Andersson to be published on the 11th of January 2022. Sweden.

From one of Sweden’s most astute cultural critics, a razor-sharp comedy of the progress and ruin of the industrial welfare state, told through the story of a single family.

Ragnar Johansson is born in 1932, a transformative moment in Swedish history. He has Swedish social democracy flowing through his veins—convinced it lifted humankind out of the dark ages and into modernity, he cherishes it. At times Ragnar despises his mother, Svea, whose perpetual baking, scrubbing, and canning represent the poverty of the peasantry. Ragnar, for his part, hails the efficiency of washing machines and prefab food. Once he has children himself, he raises them in accordance with his values, standing in the ski track supporting his daughter Elsa as she works hard to become one of the best skiers in the country. While Svea is a relic of the past, Elsa represents hope for the future. In time, however, Ragnar realizes that the world is changing. Is his golden age coming to an end?

In Son of Svea, Lena Andersson offers a characteristically funny, wise, and moving family chronicle about the social transformations that unite and divide us, and about finding the courage to be true to oneself.

3) One Eye Open by Alex Grecian to be published on the 11th of January 2022. Denmark.

TKO Studios presents "One Eye Open" by New York Times Bestselling author Alex Grecian (THE YARD) After her mother's sudden passing, Laura and her daughter Juniper return to her childhood home in the rural outskirts of Denmark. In the scenic village amidst seas of wheat fields, Laura hopes they have finally let tragedy behind them. Then, Juniper begins to notice something strange about the people she encounters, the same people who have worked in these fields for centuries. In tracing her lineage back through her mother and beyond, Juniper makes a horrifying discovery. This town is alive with more than just nature, and the endless fields of wheat demand to be harvested, whether the hands that do so are alive or dead... One Eye Open is an occult thriller about coming home and the monsters that await us there. By NY Times Bestselling Author Alex Grecian (The Yard) with illustrations by Andrea Mutti.

4) Present Tense Machine by Gunnhild Øyehaug to be published on the 11th of January 2022.

From the author of Wait, Blink and Knots, Gunnhild �yehaug's Present Tense Machine is a playful and transcendent novel about language, family, and parallel universes.



On an ordinary day in Bergen, Norway, in the late 1980s, Anna is reading in the garden while her two-year-old daughter, Laura, plays on her tricycle. Then, in one startling moment, Anna misreads a word, an alternate universe opens up, and Laura disappears. Twenty years or so later, life has gone on as if nothing happened, but in each of the women's lives, something is not quite right.

Both Anna and Laura continue to exist, but they are invisible to each other and forgotten in each other's worlds. Both are writers and amateur pianists. They are married; Anna had two more children after Laura disappeared, and Laura is expecting a child of her own. They worry about their families, their jobs, the climate--and whether this reality is all there is.

In the exquisite, wistful, slyly profound Present Tense Machine, Gunnhild Øyehaug--called "one of the most exciting writers working today" by the bestselling author Jenny Offill--delivers another dazzling renovation of what fiction can do: a testament to the fact that language shapes the world.

5) Buried in Secret by Viveca Sten to be published on the 11th of January 2022. Sweden.

When two cold case disappearances are reopened, a decade of deadly secrets is unearthed on Sandhamn Island in the #1 bestselling thriller by Viveca Sten, author of In Bad Company.

A woman’s skeletal remains are excavated on an uninhabited island in Sandhamn’s archipelago, and Thomas Andreasson is called to officially investigate. But his best friend, Nora Linde, can’t help but get involved.

On leave after her last case took a dark turn, Nora is tortured by depression, nightmares, and guilt. Her marriage fractured, her pride chipped away, Nora could find redemption in this investigation. Then evidence suggests two possible cold cases linked to the grim discovery: two women who have been missing for ten years. Now Nora feels compelled to unearth a mystery someone has gone to great pains to bury. What could have happened to require such a cover-up?

As the cold case vanishings converge, Nora follows a twisting trail of revenge, blackmail, and betrayal. She’s also inviting the watchful eye of someone determined to stop her. To free herself from the damaging grip of the past—and the reach of a relentless killer—Nora is going to have to brave the darkness one more time.

6) The Mirror Man by Lars Kepler to be published on the 18th of January 2022. Sweden.

In the latest internationally best-selling installment of the Killer Instinct series, Detective Joona Linna is on the trail of a kidnapper who targets teenage girls and makes their worst nightmares a reality.

Seventeen-year-old Jenny is abducted in broad daylight and taken to a dilapidated, isolated house where she is chained and caged along with several other girls. Their captor is unpredictable, and as wily as he is cruel: he foils every one of their desperate attempts to escape . . . and once caught they rarely survive their punishment.

Five years later, Jenny is found dead in a public park, and the police are scrambling to find a lead among the scant evidence. But Detective Joona Linna realizes that this murder has an eerie connection to a death that was declared a suicide years before. And now when Mia, a seventeen-year-old orphan, goes missing, it becomes clear to Joona that they are dealing with a serial killer—and the murderous rampage has just begun.

As the police close in on the killer, Mia and her fellow captives are plunged into ever greater danger, and Joona finds himself in a seemingly impossible race against time to save their young lives.

The Carpathian Connection by Christoffer Petersen to be published on the 3rd of January 2022. Greenland.

When the body of a young woman is found at the foot of a remote mountain in Greenland, Constable David Maratse enlists the help of a Ukrainian tourist to find the killer.

The Carpathian Connection is a quick read featuring Constable David Maratse. The story is set in Greenland and features aspects of Greenlandic culture, tradition, and not least the stunning natural environment.

Constable David Maratse also features in the popular Greenland Crime series starting with Seven Graves, One Winter, and makes regular cameo appearances in the Greenland Missing Persons series.

The Baffin Bay Stomp: A Greenland Missing Persons short story by Christoffer Petersen to be published on the 10th of January 2022. Greenland.

During a kindergarten visit aboard a cruise ship visiting the remote Greenland village of Qaanaaq, a passenger is killed. Forgotten amid the panic, Luui Angakkuarneq, the shaman’s daughter, brings a little Greenland magic to the investigation.

The Baffin Bay Stomp is a light, quick read loosely connected to the Greenland Missing Persons series, but can be read independently of that series.

George Pollock's book "Finland Murder'' to be published on the 15th of January 2022. Finland.

In 1960, two young women went for camping, with their 18-year-old boyfriends named; Seppo Antero Boisman and Nils Wilhelm Gustafsson. They had chosen a well-known campsite on the shores of Bodominjärvi, known in English as Lake Bodom. On the morning of the incident, a collapsed tent was spotted by two young boys who were hiking near the crime scene. The boys on spotting this reported to the police.
The law enforcement agency was informed of a collapsed tent in an odd way. Law enforcement came onboard and discovered around 11:00 am to see a
a triple homicide as three teens were found Murdered at Lake Bodom in Espoo, Finland.
On arrival at the scene, law enforcement agency discovered the body of Nils Wilhelm Gustafsson and his girlfriend, Maila Irmeli Björklund, outside the tent. While Gustafsson, was found alive, Seppo Antero Boisman, Maila Irmeli Björklund and Anja Tuulikki Mäki weren’t lucky. This incident led to several suspects in this case including the sole survivor himself who was even convicted but got released later on.
Read on the Finland murder…

Aur Child by I.S. Lee to be published on the 25th of January 2022. Finland.

Nordic noir meets hard science fiction in debut author I.S. Lee's deep, twisting Aur Child.

Prepare to be lured into a multi-faceted, uncertain futurescape where the boundaries between right and wrong, good and evil, and heroes and villains are blurred by the complexities of their reality.

When a fisherman unwittingly discovers clues about other people wielding great technologies, fear and uncertainty of exposure throws both societies into conflict, and forces a clutch of artificial intelligence stewards to confront their own shortcomings. As real and virtual worlds collide, so too do the worldviews that have caused this centuries-long stand-off.

Portrayed through the eyes of its cast of flawed characters, Aur Child challenges the contemporary conventions of shallow, whiz-bang entertainment and the status quo reliance on sex and violence for uninspired storytelling. It delivers a slow-burn epic adventure that eschews the worn-out tropes of the post-apocalyptic genre and sends you on a journey through time and contemplation like nothing you've ever read before.

"Meddle not with what we do not understand." Future-primitive Tellurians have enjoyed a peaceful coexistence with nature for centuries after the moment of technological collapse, described in ancient texts as Cloudburst. Only the studied elders are aware of a diaspora virtual civilization who secretly covets their energy ...and their bodies.

Will you meddle?