English Translations of Scandinavian/Nordic Mysteries & Thrillers discussion

For the month of September 2022 we have 8 books to choose from. We will add books as they become known to us, good reading.

1) The Last Crown The Last Crown by Elżbieta Cherezińska a Polish author to be published on the 6th of September 2022. Poland, Denmark, Sweden, and England.

Across Baltic shores, English battlegrounds, and the land of Northen Lights, The Last Crown is the follow up to The Widow Queen, and the epic conclusion of Swietoslawa's journey from Polish princess to Queen of Denmark & Sweden and Queen Mother of England.

2) My Brother: A Novel by Karin Smirnoff to be published on the 6th of September 2022. Sweden.

“This year’s best novel… Brutal, colourful, carnal... Impossible to put down.” --Expressen

A Swedish publishing phenomenon: a literary noir of extraordinary power follows the discovery of a young woman’s body in the long grass behind the sawmill…

Which part of the story is not for telling?

Jana Kippo has returned to Smalånger to see her twin brother, Bror, still living in the small family farmhouse in the remote north of Sweden.

Within the isolated community, secrets and lies have grown silently, undisturbed for years.

Following the discovery of a young woman's body in the long grass behind the sawmill, the siblings, hooked by a childhood steeped in darkness, need to break free.

But the truth cannot be found in other people's stories. The question is: can it be found anywhere?

3) The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2022 by Sara Paretsky to be published on the 13th of September 2022. Various + Norway.

Under the auspices of New York City's legendary mystery fiction specialty bookstore, The Mysterious Bookshop, and aided by Edgar Award-winning anthologist Otto Penzler, international bestseller and MWA Grandmaster Sara Paretsky has selected the twenty most puzzling, most thrilling, and most mysterious short stories from the past year, collected now in one entertaining volume.


Includes stories by:



Doug Allyn
Colin Barrett
Jerome Charyn
Michael Connelly
Susan Frith
Tom Larsen
Sean Marciniak
Stefon Mears
Kieth Lee Morris
Gwen Mullins
Jo Nesbø
Joyce Carol Oates
Annie Reed
Kristen Kathryn Rusch
Anna Scotti
Ginny Swart
Ellen Tremiti
Joseph S. Walker
Colson Whitehead
Michael Wiley

Plus a bonus vintage story from the annals of mystery fiction, written over a century in the past.

4) Ti Amo by Hanne Ørstavik to be published on the 13th of September 2022. Norway.

A penetrating study of passion, suffering, and loss from one of Norway's most tenacious writers: National Book Award Finalist and PEN translation prize winner Hanne Ørstavik

Celebrated throughout the world for her candor and sensitivity to the rhythms of language, Hanne Ørstavik is a leading light on the international stage. Ørstavik has "a compulsion for truth that feels like [her] very life force itself." Tentative, laced with a tingling frankness, Ørstavik's prose adheres so closely to the inner workings of its narrator's mind as to nearly undo itself. In Martin Aitken's translation, Ørstavik's piercing story sings.

Ti Amo brings a new, deeply personal approach, as the novel is based in Ørstavik's own experience of losing her Italian husband to cancer. By facing loss directly, she includes readers in an experience that many face in isolation. Written and set in the early months of 2020, its themes of loss and suffering are particularly well suited for a time of international mourning.

What can be found within a gaze? What lies inside a painting or behind a handful of repeated words? These are the questions that haunt our unnamed narrator as she tends to her husband, stricken with cancer, in the final months of his life.

She examines the elements of their life together: their Vietnamese rose-colored folding table where they eat their meals, each of the New Year's Eves they've shared, their friendships, and their most intimate exchanges.

With everything in flux, she searches for the facets that will remain.

5) Femicide: the new shocking Scandinavian thriller by Pascal Engman to be published on the 15th of September 2022. Sweden.

'Fresh, brilliant writing and utterly compelling, I loved it' Peter James
When 25-year-old Emelie is found murdered in her Stockholm apartment the same week her ex-partner is released from prison, it feels like an open and shut case for Detective Vanessa Frank. Who else would launch such a frenzied attack on the young woman?

But Frank suspects there is something they’re missing. Could the killing be linked to the rising online movement of men who want to punish women, the so-called ‘incels’? When a survivor of brutal sexual assault comes forward, Frank uncovers more about this shadowy group who, in their own words, have weaponised the gender war and will stop at nothing to make themselves heard.

Desperate to stop any further attacks, Frank escalates the investigation when a music festival intended to be a safe space for women becomes a potential target.

'A real page-turner, from the first to the last page' Camilla Lāckberg

'Irresistible reading' David Lagercrantz, author of The Girl in the Spider’s Web - Millennium series by Stieg Larsson

'He never lets go of the reader’s desire to know just how the hell this is going to go' Fredrik Backman, best-selling author of A Man Called Ove

'He absorbs the reader so you can’t stop reading' Inga-Lill Mosander.

6) Compass by Murray Lee to be published on the 22nd of September 2022. Arctic ice.

We can't all be heroes. Some try and succeed. Others posture and pretend. And a few—just a few—set off on their hero's quest only to discover that failure was within them all along.

Compass recounts the adventures of a man who, after traveling the world shilling stories for a major geographic magazine about historic expeditions and explorers, sets out on an adventure of his own—an ill-advised and poorly planned trip to the Arctic floe edge under the disorienting twenty-four-hour summer sun. When the ice breaks and his guide disappears, the narrator ends up alone and adrift in the hostile northern sea. He draws on his knowledge of historic expeditions to craft his own, inept, attempt at survival. As time passes and he becomes increasingly disoriented, his obsession with Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the sea, becomes terrifyingly real.

Part Life of Pi, part Into the Wild, Compass draws heavily on true historical adventures, Inuit mythology, and its Arctic setting. The narrator, a self-aware buffoon who remains nameless throughout, is both remarkably well-informed and entirely useless. He knows just enough to steer himself into the path of disaster—repeatedly, often comically, and ultimately tragically.

7) Hidden in Snow by Viveca Sten to be published on the 27th of September 2022. Sweden.

The splendor of the Swedish mountains becomes the backdrop for a bone-chilling crime.

On the day Stockholm police officer Hanna Ahlander’s personal and professional lives crash, she takes refuge at her sister’s lodge in the Swedish ski resort paradise of Åre. But it’s a brief comfort. The entire village is shaken by the sudden vanishing of a local teenage girl. Hanna can’t help but investigate, and while searching for the missing person, she lands a job with the local police department. There she joins forces with Detective Inspector Daniel Lindskog, who has been tasked with finding the girl. Their only lead: a scarf in the snow.

As subzero temperatures drop even further, a treacherous blizzard sweeps toward Åre. Hanna and Daniel’s investigation is getting more desperate by the hour. Lost or abducted, either way time is running out for the missing girl. Each new clue closes in on something far more sinister than either Hanna or Daniel imagined. In this devious novel by the bestselling author of the Sandhamn Murders series, discover what it will take to solve a case when the truth can be so easily hidden in the coming storm.

8) The Shadow Murders by Jussi Adler-Olsen to be published on the 27th of September 2022. Denmark.

In the penultimate thriller of the New York Times and #1 internationally bestselling Department Q series, the team must hunt for a nefarious serial killer who has slipped under the radar for decades.

On her sixtieth birthday, a woman commits suicide. When the case lands on Detective Carl Mørck’s desk, he can’t imagine what this has to do with Department Q, Copenhagen’s cold cases division. It’s a tragedy to be sure, but the cause of death seems to be clear. But his superior, Marcus Jacobsen, is convinced that this is not in fact a suicide, but a murder related to an unsolved case that has been plaguing him since 1988.

At Marcus's behest, Carl and the Department Q gang—Rose, Assad, and Gordon—reluctantly begin to investigate. However, they quickly discover that Marcus is on to something: Every two years for the past three decades, there have been unusual, impeccably timed deaths with connections between them that cannot be ignored. As they dig deeper, it becomes clear that these “accidents” are in fact murders by a very cunning and violent serial killer.

Faced with their toughest case yet, made only more difficult by COVID-19 restrictions and the challenges of their own personal lives, the Department Q team must race to find the culprit before the next murder is committed, as it is becoming increasingly clear that the killer is far from finished.

9) Chaos of the God by Donovan Cook to be published onthe 30 of September 2022. Viking.

The gods want chaos. He wants no part of their game. Can one man defy the will of the gods?

Bruised and battered from a disastrous raid, Ulf and his companions are set to return to their home. But the gods have other ideas. A violent sea storm pushes them back onto the treacherous land of Francia. With their ship damaged, Ulf and his Norse brothers are left stranded.

While the sea nearly cost them their lives, the land on the North Frankish coast could prove more deadly. And with the ruthless Griml on their tail, they must stay alert to survive.

But another threat looms over them, one that ensures the gods will get their chaos.

This battle is far from over.

10) Never to be out done we have Tally Two by Christoffer Petersen to be published on the 21st of September 2022. Greenland.

Grounded with a fever, a young Greenlandic fighter pilot is convinced she is under attack, and the only solution she can see is to get back in the air and back in the fight!

Climb into the cockpit with Greenlandic fighter pilot Ukaliina “Sled Dog” Nakinngi in this short, adrenaline-fuelled story set in the Arctic, and join self-confessed Top Gun fanboy Christoffer Petersen in this tongue-in-cheek adventure from Greenland.

11) Sold in the United Kingdom Sweet Dreams by Anders Roslund to be published on the 11 of September 2022. Sweden.

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER*

'Nerve-wracking dark suspense with a masterly resolution. Anders Roslund is a marvellously talented author' Erik Axl Sund, bestselling author of THE CROW GIRL

'A perfect example of Scandi noir' The Times

***

Two little girls go missing on the same day in Stockholm. Their disappearances are never explained. In time, the investigations are abandoned.

A chance discovery puts Detective Ewert Grens back on the trail five years later. His own personal trauma makes him determined to find out what happened to these children who were snatched from a supermarket and a car park and never seen again.

His search leads him into the recesses of the dark web and the discovery of a paedophile ring that can only be cracked from the inside. Grens is forced to call upon his retired partner, Piet Hoffman, the best undercover operative he knows, to try to infiltrate the group.

They will have only one chance - but are they up to the darkest challenge of their lives?

11) The Axe Woman: The Godfather of Swedish Crime by Håkan Nesser published on the 1st of September 2022. Sweden.

Reviewed by damppebbles:

Inspector Gunnar Barbarotti returns to work following a personal tragedy only for his senior officer to ask him to investigate a five-year-old cold case. It feels to Barbarotti as though he’s been given ‘busy work’. Something to test whether he’s fit to return to the force, a task to gently ease him back in before being given a more challenging case. But he can’t be sure of Asunander’s motives so decides to investigate the disappearance of Arnold Morinder to the best of his ability. Morinder disappeared from the town of Kymlinge, Sweden without a trace in August 2007. Reported missing three days later by his partner Ellen Bjarnebo, no trace of Morinder (apart from his discarded blue moped) was ever found. But the name Ellen Bjarnebo is well known to the local police. Ellen Bjarnebo, or Helgesson as she was previously known, is the notorious Axe Woman of Little Burma. A woman who twenty years ago killed her husband and took an axe to his body to hide the evidence. Barbarotti is determined to track the elusive Axe Woman of Little Burma down and get to the bottom of what happened to Morinder. Who really is Ellen Bjarnebo, why did she kill her first husband in such a brutal manner and what does she know about the disappearance of Arnold Morinder…?

12) A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding  by Amanda Svensson to be published on the 20th of September 2022. Sweden.

Are we free to create our own destinies or are we just part of a system beyond our control?

A joyful family saga about free will, forgiveness, and how we are all interconnected.

In October 1989, a set of triplets is born, and it is this moment their father chooses to reveal his affair. Pandemonium ensues.

Over two decades later, Sebastian is recruited to join a mysterious organization, the London Institute of Cognitive Science, where he meets Laura Kadinsky, a patient whose inability to see the world in three dimensions is not the only thing about her that intrigues him. Meanwhile, Clara has traveled to Easter Island to join a doomsday cult, and the third triplet, Matilda, is in Sweden, trying to escape from the color blue.

Then something happens that forces the triplets to reunite. Their mother calls with worrying news: their father has gone missing and she has something to tell them, a twenty-five-year secret that will change all their lives …