Tag: literature in translation

Read my review of Mexico Street

Twenty floors above the shimmering lights of the Hamburg docks, Public Prosecutor Chastity Riley is celebrating a birthday with friends in a hotel bar when twelve heavily armed men pull out guns, and take everyone hostage. Among the hostages is Konrad Hoogsmart, the hotel owner, who is being targeted by a young man whose life – and family – have been destroyed by Hoogsmart’s actions.

With the police looking on from outside – their colleagues’ lives at stake – and Chastity on the inside, increasingly ill from an unexpected case of sepsis, the stage is set for a dramatic confrontation … and a devastating outcome for the team … all live streamed in a terrifying bid for revenge.

Crackling with energy and populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, Hotel Cartagena is a searing, stunning thriller that will leave you breathless.

Simone Buchholz was born in Hanau in 1972. At university, she studied Philosophy and Literature, worked as a waitress and a columnist, and trained to be a journalist at the prestigious Henri-Nannen-School in Hamburg.

In 2016, Simone Buchholz was awarded the Crime Cologne Award as well as runner-up in the German Crime Fiction Prize for Blue Night, which was number one on the KrimiZEIT Best of Crime List for months.

She lives in Sankt Pauli, in the heart of Hamburg, with her husband and son.

My thoughts:

This was a trippy book, with strange moments where the text changes form as the narrator lapses in and out of consciousness and struggles with sepsis. Moving from Germany to Colombia and back, it traces a reckoning years in the making as well as one eventful and strange night in a bar.

The shocking twists and turns of the night, as the story moves back in time and then returns to the present is gripping and utterly compelling. Who are the gunmen and why is the bartender so relaxed? What is happening to Chastity’s mind as her friends’ faces swim in and out of focus?

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.

Easter weekend is approaching, and snow is gently falling in Siglufjörður, the northernmost town in Iceland, as crowds of tourists arrive to visit the majestic ski slopes.

Ari Thór Arason is now a police inspector, but he’s separated from his girlfriend, who lives in Sweden with their three-year-old son.

A family reunion is planned for the holiday, but a violent blizzard is threatening and there is an unsettling chill in the air. Three days before Easter, a nineteen-year-old local girl falls to her death from the balcony of a house on the main street.

A perplexing entry in her diary suggests that this may not be an accident, and when an old man in a local nursing home writes ‘She was murdered’ again and again on the wall of his room, there is every suggestion that something more sinister lies at the heart of her death…

As the extreme weather closes in, cutting the power and access to Siglufjörður, Ari Thór must piece together the puzzle to reveal a horrible truth … one that will leave no one unscathed.

Chilling, claustrophobic and disturbing, Winterkill marks the startling conclusion to the million-copy bestselling Dark Iceland series and cements Ragnar Jónasson as one of the most exciting authors in crime fiction.

Icelandic crime writer Ragnar Jónasson was born in Reykjavík, and currently works as a lawyer, while teacher copyright law at the Reykjavík University Law School.

In the past, he’s worked in TV and radio, including as a news reporter for the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service. Before embarking on a writing career, Ragnar translated fourteen Agatha Christie novels into Icelandic, and has had several short stories published in German, English and Icelandic literary magazines.

Ragnar set up the first overseas chapter of the CWA (Crime Writers’ Association) in Reykjavík, and is co-founder of the International crime-writing festival Iceland Noir.

Ragnar’s debut thriller, Snowblind became an almost instant bestseller when it was published in June 2015n with Nightblind (winner of the Dead Good Reads Most Captivating Crime in Translation Award) and then Blackout, Rupture and Whiteout following soon after.

To date, Ragnar Jónasson has written five novels in the Dark Iceland series, which has been optioned for TV by On the Corner.

He lives in Reykjavík with his wife and two daughters.

My thoughts:

This was really good, the snow closing in on a small town, an unexplained death, a teenage girl with secrets and a detective who just wants to spend time with his son.

Ari Thór is called out late at night to an apparent suicide of a young woman, it doesn’t appear suspicious, although the building she jumped from wasn’t her home. But he starts to investigate, while there might not be a crime, something caused her to leap to her death, and he wants to get an answer for her devastated mother.

His ex-partner and young son have just arrived to spend the Easter weekend with him, but he needs to solve the case. This struggle is what caused their break-up and he doesn’t want to risk alienating them further.

A blizzard sets in, trapping the locals in their small town and causing Ari Thór to struggle to get to the truth, when the power goes out. But he pieces the clues together to unravel a tragedy and find someone who is guilty, even if they didn’t kill anyone.

Gripping, claustrophobic, creepy (some of the characters were a bit sinister, like the father and son hiding out on an island), and clever.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.

Read my review of Wolves at the Door here.

When Bergen PI Varg Veum finds himself at the funeral of a former classmate on a sleet-grey December afternoon, he’s unexpectedly reunited with his old friend Jakob – guitarist of the once-famous 1960s rock band The Harpers – and his estranged wife, Rebecca, Veum’s first love.

Their rekindled friendship is thrown into jeopardy by the discovery of a horrific murder, and Veum is forced to dig deep into his own adolescence and his darkest memories, to find a motive … and a killer.

Tense, vivid and deeply unsettling, Fallen Angels is the spellbinding, award-winning thriller that secured Gunnar Staalesen’s reputation as one of the world’s foremost crime writers.

One of the fathers of Nordic Noir, Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen, Norway, in 1947. He made his debut at the age of twenty-two with Seasons of Innocence and in 1977 he published the first book in the Varg Veum series.

He is the author of over twenty titles, which have been published in twenty-four countries and sold over four million copies. Twelve film adaptations of his Varg Veum crime novels have appeared since 2007, starring the popular Norwegian actor Trond Espen Seim.

Staalesen has won three Golden Pistols (including the Prize of Honour) and Where Roses Never Die won the 2017 Petrona Award for Nordic Crime Fiction, and Big Sister was shortlisted in 2019.

He lives with his wife in Bergen.

My thoughts:

Varg Veum seems to always find the darkest parts of humanity when he investigates a case and this is no exception. After an old school friend’s funeral he finds himself spending time with another old pal, Jakob, and Jakob’s wife has walked out on him. Could Varg do him a favour and find her? See if she’d maybe come back?

Then Jakob’s former band mate, Johnny, is murdered and Varg starts to dig into the events surrounding the band’s break up, all those years ago and what he starts to dig up is dark and twisted and has brought about a terrible revenge.

Jakob is the only surviving member, and every death starts to look suspicious to Varg, the dead men received postcards with angels on them, counting down the dead.

Dark, gripping and horrifying, this is powerful and exposes the underbelly of the music industry as well as the depravity in some men’s souls. It’s easy to see why Staalesen is regarded as a master of Nordic noir with his pitch black explorations of Norway’s secret corners and hidden horrors.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.

Three bodies lie at the bottom of a swimming pool in a gated country estate near Buenos Aires.

It’s Thursday night at the magnificent Scaglia house. Behind the locked gates, shielded from the crime, poverty and filth of the people on the streets, the Scaglias and their friends hide lives of infidelity, alcoholism, and abusive marriage.

Claudia Piñeiro’s novel eerily foreshadowed a criminal case that generated a scandal in the Argentine media. But this is more than a story about crime. The suspense is a by-product of Piñeiro’s hand at crafting a psychological portrait of a professional class that lives beyond its means and leads secret lives of deadly stress and despair.

It takes place during the post 9/11 economic melt-down in Argentina but it’s a universal story that will resonate among credit-crunched readers of today.

Claudia Piñeiro was a journalist, playwright and television scriptwriter and in 1992 won the prestigious Pléyade journalism award. She has more recently turned to fiction and is the author of literary crime novels that are all bestsellers in Latin America and have been translated into four languages.

This novel won the Clarin Prize for fiction and is her first title to be available in English.

The Translator

Miranda France wrote Bad Times in Buenos Aires which in essay form won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize in The Spectator magazine. A book by the same title was published in 1998 and met with great critical acclaim. The New York Times described it as ‘a remarkable achievement’ and the Sunday Times as ‘an outstanding book’.

My thoughts:

This was a clever book, the opening gives nothing away, and the plot veers away from the shocking discovery to reveal more about the community safe behind their gates, their lies and secrets laid bare to the reader, only returning to the bodies in the pool right at the end, when you’ve almost forgotten about them.

The wealthy elite pride themselves on their beautiful homes, their immaculate green lawns and regular attendance on the golf course and tennis courts, but the veneer of success is thin and starting to crack as the economy tanks, taking with it jobs and security.

Every home holds secrets and the women of this gated community see all, and are telling all. Told mostly by Veronica, estate agent and the one holding her family together, someone who’s seen inside almost every home.

This was such a slow burn of a book, I genuinely forgot about the bodies in the pool until it circled back round to them and the plot that ends in three deaths is revealed. The ending left me wondering if there was a sequel somewhere, I wanted to know what choice was made.

I also tried to find out what scandal the author foresaw, but Google let me down there, if you know, tell me in the comments please.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.