All I want for Christmas is you! Mrs. Peabody’s 2023 top crime picks

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Here’s Mrs. Peabody’s 2023 Christmas crime list — featuring some of my top reads of the last twelve months (though not necessarily from this year). The books are set in America, Argentina, Australia, Finnish Lapland, Ireland, Japan, Lebanon, Russia and the UK. 

Treat others! Treat yourself! Support local booksellers!

María Angélica Bosco, Death Going Down, tr. from the Spanish by Lucy Greaves (Pushkin Vertigo 2017; first published 1954)

Setting: 1950s Buenos Aires, Argentina

First line: The car pulled up in front of an apartment building on one of the first blocks of Calle Santa Fe, where the street opens out to a view across the wide Plaza San Martín.

María Angélica Bosco (1917-2006) is often styled as the Argentinian Agatha Christie, and this tightly plotted crime novel amply illustrates why. When glamorous Frida Eidinger is found dead in the lift of a luxury Buenos Aires apartment block, its residents — all of whom are hiding secrets beneath their respectable bourgeois exteriors — find themselves the main suspects in the case. While the police inspectors are no match for Christie’s Poirot, their investigation reveals the fascinating diversity of post-1945 Argentinian society. Those questioned include Germans and Bulgarians, many of whom are fleeing the complexities of a war-ravaged Old Europe. Or so they think. And as the novel’s first line shows, Bosco also paints an evocative picture of a unique South American city. A classic crime novel with a difference, deftly translated by Lucy Greaves. 

Jane Harper, Exiles (Pan Macmillan 2023)

Setting: present-day South Australia, wine country

First line: Think back. The signs were there. What were they?

How I love Jane Harper’s absorbing, intelligent crime fiction, which so elegantly plumbs the emotional depths of families and small communities. Exiles opens a year after the strange disappearance of Kim Gillespie, who was spotted multiple times at the Marralee Valley Food and Wine Festival before seemingly vanishing into thin air, leaving her baby tucked up in a pram for the festival organisers to find at the end of the night. Except no one can quite believe that Kim would have done this, and some of her family — especially her teenage daughter Zara — are convinced that something terrible has happened to her. What unfolds is a complex, multi-layered story that’s wholly convincing, with a cast of wonderfully realised characters. Exiles is the third in the ‘Aaron Falk’ trilogy, but can absolutely be read as a standalone (nothing from the previous books is given away). A top-notch read.

Jesse Sutanto, Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (HarperCollins 2023)

Setting: Chinatown, San Francisco, USA

First lines: Vera Wong Zhuzhu, age sixty, is a pig, but she really should have been born a rooster. We are, of course, referring to Chinese horoscopes. 

I’ve become fond of cosy crime novels over the last few years — a welcome antidote to the world’s rougher edges — but only if they have a bit of depth. Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, by Jesse Sutanto, is a great example of how a cosy can leave you feeling warm and uplifted while also engaging with serious issues, such as the damaging social loneliness that older people often experience. At first glance, Vera Wong is a ‘typical’ overbearing first-generation mother: opinionated, meddling and chronically attached to the ‘old ways’. Her traditional Chinese teahouse, which she built up and ran with her late husband, is now shabby and largely deserted, and she’s on the brink of a serious depression. Until, that is, she finds a body sprawled on the floor of her teahouse, and decides to investigate the murder in her own unique way… I listened to the audiobook, which was fabulously narrated by Eunice Wong and made me laugh out loud. Lovers of Chinese cuisine will delight in the mouth-watering descriptions of various Chinese teas and dishes. A skilfully written cosy with heart.

Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends (Bloomsbury 2015)

Setting: 20th-century England, Russia, Lebanon

First line: Two middle-aged spies are sitting in an apartment in the Christian Quarter, sipping tea and lying courteously to one another, as evening approaches.

Back in January, I watched the ITV adaptation of A Spy Among Friends, featuring two excellent performances by Guy Pearce and Damian Lewis. That made me seek out Ben Macintyre’s jaw-dropping book, which tells the true story of Kim Philby, possibly the most notorious of all double agents, who spent decades spying for Russia while working at the very heart of the British intelligence. Betraying one’s country should be the worst of the crimes the book explores, but  Philby’s extraordinary exploitation and betrayal of deep friendships comes a close second. A brilliantly researched piece of espionage history, this is non-fiction that reads like an incredibly exciting thriller. If you’re a John le Carré fan, this real-life Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is most definitely for you.

Pair it with Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor (Penguin 2019), which tells the equally gripping story of Oleg Gordievsky, the Soviet double-agent who arguably helped to bring about the end of the Cold War, and Rosamund Pike’s podcast Mother, Neighbour, Russian Spy, which examines the more recent, astonishing case of ‘Cindy Murphy’, aka Lydia Guryev, a Russian spy who lived in deep cover in the United States for a number of years — a fact kept from her two American-born children.

Louise Erdrich, The Round House (Corsair 2013 [2012])

Setting: 1980s North Dakota, USA

First line: Small trees had attacked my parents’ house at the foundation.

2023 was the year I discovered Louise Erdrich, and my Christmas list would be incomplete without her novel The Round House — a stunning dissection of a crime and its consequences. At the heart of the story are the Coutts family, who live on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. When Joe’s mother Geraldine is raped and falls into a deep depression that threatens to destroy her, Joe and his father Bazil, a tribal judge, seek justice for her in different ways. This individual case also allows past crimes committed by the state against the Ojibwe, and especially Ojibwe women, to be illuminated. It’s an intricate, expertly told tale, and there’s a warmth and complexity to the main characters that’s hugely compelling. See my full review here.

Jess Kidd, Himself (Canongate, 2020)

Setting: rural 1970s Ireland

First line: Mahony shoulders his rucksack, steps off the bus and stands in the dead centre of the village of Mulderrig.

I recently re-read Jess Kidd’s Himself (for perhaps the third or fourth time), and fell in love with it all over again. As it’s not featured on one of my Christmas lists before, I’m going to sneak in this finely crafted gem here… It’s Ireland, 1976: Mahony, a charming young man brought up by nuns in a Dublin orphanage, returns to Mulderrig, a tiny village he recently found out was his birthplace. He’s the son of Orla Sweeney, who scandalised the village with her behaviour and supposedly disappeared in 1950. With the help of the eccentric Mrs. Cauley and a host of benign spirits who waft through walls, he starts uncovering the hypocrisies, secrets and malign power dynamics of the village. Utterly original, beautifully written and often wickedly funny, this is a crime novel to savour.

Petra Rautiainen, Land of Snow and Ashes, tr. from the Finnish by David Hackston (Pushkin Press 2022)

Setting: 1940s and 1950s Finnish Lapland

First line: I arrived in Inari yesterday, transferred from the penal colony at Hyljelahti. This new camp isn’t marked on Finnish maps.

Petra Rautiainen’s Land of Snow and Ashes is a historical crime novel that explores a lesser-known aspect of the Second World War: Finland’s brief alliance with Nazi Germany following its occupation of Finland, which included the establishment of a network of camps in Western Lapland. The novel initially unfolds along two timelines — 1944 and 1947 — which seem to lie very close together but are actually worlds apart. In 1944 the Nazi occupation and camps are still in place, while 1947 falls after the Nazi retreat that razed everything it could to the ground, including entire towns like Rovaniemi. We see events through the eyes of two very different narrators: young Finnish soldier Väinö Remes, an interpreter at the Inari camp, and photo-journalist Inkeri Lindquist, who is searching for her missing husband Kaarlo. Thoughtful consideration is also given to the impact on traditional Sámi ways of life by the war and Finnish attempts to ‘educate’ Sámi children in boarding schools in the post-war era. A hard-hitting but rewarding read, skilfully translated by David Hackston, and shortlisted for the Petrona Award.

Seichō Matsumoto, Point Zero, tr. from the Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai (Bitter Lemon Press 2024, [1958])

Setting: 1950s Tokyo and Kanazawa, Japan

If you’re given a book token for Christmas, then allow me to recommend Point Zero, out in February 2024 from Bitter Lemon Press — it’s just the thing to get your international crime reading off to a cracking start in the new year. I’ve long been a fan of Matsumoto’s work, but am particularly taken with this novel as it features a female investigative lead, which was surely ground-breaking for the time. Set in 1958, Point Zero tells the story of a young woman, Teiko Uhara, whose husband Kenichi vanishes shortly after their honeymoon. Deeply unsettled by his disappearance, Teiko visits the remote coastal city of Kanazawa, where Kenichi was last seen, to piece together what happened. As well as being an absorbing mystery, Point Zero is an accomplished social crime novel. Set less than fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, it skilfully depicts the tensions between traditional and modern Japan in the aftermath of the country’s military defeat, especially for a certain generation of Japanese women. Beautifully translated by Louise Heal Kawai, Point Zero is a reminder of the important role translations can play in illuminating other cultures and eras.

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Louise Erdrich’s The Round House (USA), James Wolff’s The Man in the Corduroy Suit (UK/Russia), and Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit (USA/Space)

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Hello, everyone! It’s been a while hasn’t it? I hope you’re all as well as can be and embarking on some quality autumn reading.

Here’s a small selection of the crime that’s grabbed me lately. All three novels are loosely part of larger series, but can be read as standalones. All draw on the crime genre in intriguing ways.

Louise Erdrich, The Round House, Corsair 2013 [2012], USA

First line: Small trees had attacked my parents’ house at the foundation.

How have I managed to miss Louise Erdrich on my literary travels? She’s such a prolific and acclaimed author, and her writing is so very good. I’ve caught up with two of her novels thus far — The Round House (2012) and The Sentence (2021). The Night Watchman (2020), which won a Pulitzer, is next on my list.

Erdrich is viewed as a ‘literary’ author rather than crime writer, but her novels often explore the impact of individual and institutional crimes. The Round House, in particular, is a stunning dissection of a crime and its spiralling consequences. Our narrator, Joe Coutts, reflects on the traumatic summer of 1988, when his mother Geraldine was raped and fell into a deep depression that threatened to destroy her.

The Coutts live on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota, and Joe’s father Bazil, a tribal judge, initially seeks justice for his wife via legal means. However, it’s unclear exactly where the crime against Geraldine took place — on land that’s under federal government or reservation jurisdiction? — and this slows the investigation. Frustrated, 13-year-old Joe and his friends start looking for clues, which in turn fuels a desire for revenge. The questions of what kind of justice should prevail and at what cost are thus central. So too are past and present crimes committed by the state against the Ojibwe, and especially Ojibwe women. It’s an intricate, expertly told tale, and there’s a warmth and complexity to the main characters that’s hugely compelling.

The Round House is part of Erdrich’s ‘justice trilogy’ (all three works can be read as standalones, but intersect thematically). The others are The Plague of Doves and LaRose, now also on my list.

If you’d like to learn more about this superb author, who continues to draw extensively on her Native American heritage, head over to this article on Britiannia.com.

James Wolff, The Man in the Corduroy Suit, Bitter Lemon Press 2023, UK

First line: Confidential. We are writing to inform you that a 64-year-old woman named Willa KARLSSON was admitted to University College Hospital last night in an unconscious state.

One of the heirs to the late, great espionage writer John le Carré is James Wolff, who like the latter once worked for the British government in a rather opaque capacity.

Along with Mick Herron of ‘Slow Horses’ fame, Wolff shares le Carré’s deep interest in the individuals who work for the intelligence services. Some are brilliant but flawed, some are social misfits looking for a home, some are pen-pushers in search of glory, and some are collateral damage, sacrificed to strategic aims or power plays. What Herron and Wolff both excel at is capturing the Catch-22 absurdities of service life, depicting surreal, blackly comical scenarios that are more The Office than James Bond. At the same time, they raise some really serious questions about the purpose of the intelligence services and what they do — their novels are a long way from being mere comic romps.

The maverick hero of The Man in the Corduroy Suit is (wait for it) corduroy-suit-wearing Leonard Flood, a relatively junior intelligence officer who is tasked by the shadowy ‘Gatekeeping’ section to investigate the possible Russian poisoning of British agent Willa Karlsson. We follow Flood as he burrows expertly into Willa’s life and work, to the point where, like many of le Carré’s protagonists, he has big moral and ethical decisions to make.

This is the third espionage novel in the excellent ‘Discipline Files’ trilogy. I read them completely out of order, but you may wish to start with the first, Beside the Syrian Sea.

Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers 2), Hodderscape 2016, USA / Space

First Line: Mimetic AI housing is banned in all GC territories, outposts, facilities and vessels.

The author Becky Chambers is another recent discovery, and quite frankly she’s a marvel. Both of her parents worked in the field of space science, and this has clearly shaped her own writing imagination…

Chambers’ ‘Wayfarers’ series, which won a prestigious Hugo Award in 2019, has been variously described as space opera, solar punk and hope punk, and explores the future of humanity via the stories of individuals and small groups living on space ships or space stations, or in GC (Galactic Commons) colonies.

While not crime fiction as such, questions of crime, justice and closure dominate A Closed and Common Orbit. The novel tells the story of AI Lovelace — recently decanted from a space ship into an illegal body following an emergency — and her engineer friend Pepper, whose own extraordinary tale of youthful survival unfolds in the course of the narrative. Those tracking current AI debates may be interested in the more hopeful possibilities the novel depicts of future human-AI interactions, as well as cross-species communications and tolerance (there are fabulous depictions of alien civilisations and cultures throughout).

A Closed and Common Orbit is the ‘standalone sequel’ to The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. While the latter isn’t crime, it’s a great introduction to Chamber’s character-rich work. Like all of the novels discussed in this post, it has a big heart and plenty of humanity, which is certainly something we need right now.

Let me know in the comments what you’ve been enjoying too!

1920s Bombay, 1960s North Carolina & 1990s Western Australia: top international crime – with a sidebar on the Murdaugh case

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Sujata Massey, The Widows of Malabar Hill (Soho Press, 2018)

First line: On the morning Perveen saw the stranger, they’d almost collided.

It’s 1921. Perveen, the Oxford-educated daughter of a well-off Parsi family, is Bombay’s first female lawyer, and works for the family law firm at Mistry House. While her duties are restricted — she’s not allowed to appear in court — there are certain things she can do that male lawyers can’t. For example, when wealthy client Omar Farid passes away, Perveen is the only lawyer who can gain access to his three secluded widows to advise them on their rights. A short while later, Mr. Mukri, the estate’s highly unpleasant trustee, is found lying dead in the house…

This is a really rich historical crime novel. As well as evoking the many sights and sounds of 1920s Bombay, readers are given a fascinating insight into Muslim, Hindu and Parsi (Zoroastrian) traditions — especially in relation to inheritance law (always lawyer up, ladies!) We’re also shown how, even in relatively privileged contexts, women are at risk of falling into seriously disadvantageous situations — and that includes Perveen, who is getting over her own personal trauma. She’s a great character and I’m looking forward to meeting her again in the other novels in the series.

Author Sujata Massey says Perveen was ‘inspired by India’s earliest women lawyers: Cornelia Sorabji of Poona, the first woman to read law at Oxford and the first woman to sit the British law exam in 1892, and Mithan Tata Lam of Bombay, who also read law at Oxford and was the first woman admitted to the Bombay Bar in 1923.’

Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing (Corsair 2019)

Opening lines: Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky.

Where the Crawdads Sing sat on my shelf for a while, because I wasn’t sure it had a high enough ‘crime quota’ to hold my interest. But it does and it did. While by no means purely a crime novel — it’s more a fusion of coming-of-age, crime and natural history elements — there’s a satisfying murder mystery at its heart, with plenty of investigative detail and courtroom drama.

The story begins in North Carolina in 1969, when Chase Andrews, a wealthy young man from Barkley Cove, is found dead in the marsh beyond the town. Suspicion falls on Kya Clark, known locally as the ‘Marsh Girl’, who has had some contact with Chase in the past. Sheriff Ed Jackson decides there are enough unanswered questions to investigate.

The story of the investigation is interwoven with the story of Kya’s life, starting in 1952, when her mother leaves the family home after years of abuse. Kya is forced to survive emotionally and financially in their shack out on the salt marsh, and the novel is very good on the realities of poverty. Her solace is the nature all around her, and she embarks on a personal journey as a very unusual observer and chronicler of marsh life. Author Delia Owens worked for many years as a wildlife scientist, and her descriptions of the natural world give the novel a wonderful sense of place, while also highlighting the prejudice of the town towards someone who doesn’t ‘fit in’, but who loves and understands the marsh completely. A poignant tale with emotional depth, Crawdads has recently been turned into what looks like a slightly sanitised Netflix film starring Daisy Edgar-Jones.

The novel’s North Carolina setting and depictions of class lead me neatly onto a real-life case that’s just reached a judicial conclusion in South Carolina.

Murdaugh Murders Podcast

Earlier this week, South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh was found guilty of killing his wife and son, Maggie and Paul Murdaugh, and has been sentenced to life in prison without parole.

But in all honesty, that news is just the tip of a very big iceberg…

The Murdaugh murder case is an grimly fascinating example of where entrenched entitlement, privilege and power can lead. Alex belongs to the wealthy Murdaugh dynasty, which for the last 100 years has maintained a lucrative, iron grip on the judicial system in South Carolina’s impoverished Low Country (very similar to the setting of Owen’s novel).

While outwardly respectable, the family has been linked to five deaths since 2015: those of Stephen Smith, a young gay man who was a high school friend of Alex’s eldest son Buster Murdaugh; Gloria Satterfield, the Murdaugh family housekeeper; Mallory Beach, a young friend of Paul Murdaugh, who died following a crash in a boat he was piloting — and then Paul and his mother Maggie. Alex’s motive for committing the latter two murders seems to have been financial: the investigations into the boat crash and his wife’s divorce plans threatened to reveal Alex’s embezzlement of at least $8 million from his law firm and its clients, who included Gloria Satterfield’s sons (he pocketed the compensation settlement for her death).

As the lawyer acting for the Satterfield sons says, Alex Murdaugh is ‘a really, really, really, really, REALLY bad man’. Generations of privilege and untouchability produced an incredibly toxic individual, and it’s actually quite remarkable that (partial) justice has now been served. Several investigations are still ongoing.

There are HBO and Netflix documentaries on the case, but I’ve been dipping into the Murdaugh Murders podcast by South Carolina journalist Mandy Matney, who has been reporting tenaciously on the case since 2019, and whose research unearthed some crucial information — just one of the reasons why small-town journalism needs to be supported and maintained…

This prequel to 2018’s Mystery Road — matter-of-factly entitled Mystery Road: Origin — is every bit as good as that first series.

Here’s Jay Swan as a young man in 1999, returning from police training in the city to the outback mining town of Jardine where he grew up. It’s not the easiest of homecomings, as Jay has to negotiate the tensions his presence as an indigenous policeman create in both the white and Aboriginal communities — the latter including his father and brother. And then there’s a cold case involving the death of a young indigenous man, and a present day suicide that doesn’t quite add up…

Against this backdrop, Jay starts getting to know Mary Allen, and each in their own way begins the painstaking process of uncovering the town’s secrets, which have been festering away for decades. The way in which affable Aussie banter and mateyness masks deep-rooted racism and violence is particularly well done.

Both of the young leads — Mark Coles Smith as Jay and Tuuli Narkle as Mary — are excellent, and they’re supported by a top-notch cast (especially Mary’s mum and police chief Peter). As ever, the writing and cinematography are great too.

I saw the series on BBC iPlayer, where it’s available for another 10 months.

Jingle all the way! Mrs. Peabody’s 2022 Xmas Crime List

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Here’s Mrs. Peabody’s 2022 Christmas crime list — featuring crime set in America, Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Japan and space! 

Treat others! Treat yourself! Support local booksellers!

Marcie R. Rendon, Murder on the Red River (Soho Press 2022)

Setting: 1970s Midwest America

Murder on the Red River is the first in a crime trilogy featuring Renee ‘Cash’ Blackbear. She’s just 19, both toughened and traumatized by a childhood in foster care after being taken from her Ojibwe family at the age of three. When not driving harvest trucks for local Midwest farmers or playing pool, Cash occasionally helps out Sheriff Wheaton — a lifelong ally. Following the murder of a Native American man, she gains access the victim’s community and progresses the investigation using cues from a series of visions. Cash is a wonderful, multifaceted character who will soon have you willing her on. The novel also shows her embarking on a personal journey against the backdrop of the Minnesota American Indian Movement (AIM), which is starting to make the historical crimes committed by European settlers visible. 

Seicho Matsumoto, Tokyo Express, tr. from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood (Penguin Modern Classics 2022; first published 1958)

Setting: 1950s Tokyo and Hakata Bay, Japan 

This beautifully translated Japanese crime novel is a classic by a master of the genre — a police procedural that shows how vital investigative doggedness is to closing out a case. The case in question is both simple and not so simple. A pair of young lovers from Tokyo are discovered lying on the beach of Hakata Bay in what looks to be a double-suicide. But an old hand in the local police force and a younger Tokyo inspector both suspect something is wrong. In tandem, they work out the true story of what took place. The pace of Tokyo Express is slow and quietly gripping, with lots of old-fashioned sleuthing that offers the reader lovely diagrams of station platforms and timetables to puzzle over. An elegant pleasure. 

Eva Jurczyk, The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (Poisoned Pen Press 2022)

Setting: Canadian university library

Given the cover, you would be forgiven for expecting a light read, but The Department of Rare Books delivers something altogether more complex and rewarding. Liesl Weiss, the sixty-plus assistant director of the department in question, is recalled from her sabbatical after boss Christopher Wolfe is felled by a stroke. Tasked by the Chancellor with keeping donors happy and the show on the road, she immediately faces two crises: the disappearance of the newly acquired Plantin Polyglot Bible and a member of staff. Part literary mystery, part exploration of four decades in the lives of a close-knit but prickly group of librarians, and part coming-of-age story (it’s never too late!), this is an absorbing and surprisingly gritty crime novel. I will never look at a university librarian in the same way again.

Shelley Burr, Wake (Hodder & Stoughton 2022)

Setting: New South Wales, Australia

Burr’s hugely accomplished debut novel is set in and around the small, outback town of Nannine. Twenty years ago, Mina McCreerey’s nine-year-old twin sister Evelyn vanished from the remote family sheep farm in the middle of the night. The case remains unsolved, leaving Mina and her father in a terrible limbo — and prey for gossipy online forums that like to implicate them in the crime. When Mina is approached by Lane Holland, a maverick private investigator, she is initially wary. But Lane’s success in other cases gradually convinces her to give him a go — though she is unaware that he carries secrets of his own. Wake is both a sensitive portrayal of the long-term effects of trauma and a riveting, tightly plotted cold-case noir. 

Charlotte Carter, Rhode Island Red (Baskerville 2022)

Setting: 1990s New York 

Charlotte Carter’s off-beat 1990s crime trilogy was reissued this year with a splendid new set of covers. Our heroine is Nanette Hayes, wise-cracking saxophonist, French translator and amateur sleuth. One afternoon after a street gig, she agrees to put up a charming fellow musician for the night, only to find him sprawled out murdered the following morning. Worse still, he turns out to have been an undercover cop, which brings lots of unwelcome attention to her door. Set in New York and steeped in the jazz of greats like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, Rhode Island Red is a sparky, original take on the private eye novel, and explores a Black woman’s experiences in the Big Apple of the 1990s in a lively and nuanced way. 

Eloísa Díaz, Repentance (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2022)

Setting: Argentina in 1981 and 2001

Spanish author Eloísa Díaz drew on her Argentine family roots when writing this powerful historical crime novel. Repentance explores one ‘small story’, that of Buenos Aires police inspector Joaquin Alzada and his teacher brother Jorge, at two key historical junctures: 1981, when Argentina is in the grip of a military dictatorship that is disappearing young activists (The Dirty War) and 2001, when economic turmoil is bringing exasperated citizens out on the streets to protest. It’s at this point that Alzada, long since demoted to a desk job, gets to investigate a murder due to staff shortages — and then faces the eternal dilemma: whether to turn a blind eye to the injustices perpetrated by those in power or to do what he knows is right. There is, of course, no easy answer. Alzada is as complex as the history he’s caught up in — and his biting humour and love of family infuse the novel with warmth.

Kirstin Chen, Counterfeit (The Borough Press 2022)

Setting: America, Hong Kong, China

Counterfeit begins with Ava — a Chinese-American lawyer struggling with the demands of motherhood — telling Detective Murphy how she got entangled in the criminal activities of Chinese former college roommate Winnie. The latter had reinvented herself as a sleek and glamorous businesswoman, and was running an ingenious designer goods scam. But is Ava telling the whole truth or did things unfold a little differently? Behind this hugely entertaining tale lie some serious questions — first and foremost, what price freedom? The novel provides fascinating insights into modern Chinese society, the interplay of Chinese state capitalism and American consumerism, and the struggles of women to gain full control over their lives. Bonus: you’ll be immune to the lure of designer handbags once you’ve read this book.   

Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility (Picador 2022)

Setting: Canada, the future, space

Get ready for a wild ride. In 1912, disgraced aristocrat Edwin St. Andrew experiences what he thinks is a hallucination. For a split second, in a remote forest on Vancouver Island, he senses a cavernous space and the sound of a violin. In 2203, a novel by Moon Colony Two dweller Olive Llewellyn contains a passage in which a man plays the violin in an airship terminal while trees rise around him. And in 2401, an era when time travel is a crime, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts is sent to investigate a space-time anomaly caught on film in 1994 — which features notes from a violin. It’s the start of Roberts’ sleuthing at various moments in time… Sea of Tranquility remains one of my all-time favourites this year: a genre-bending fusion of crime and science fiction. 

And if you’re looking for more top-quality international crime fiction, I’d thoroughly recommend Bitter Lemon Press and Orenda Books. 

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Autumn crime picks: Marple (UK), Sally McGrane’s Odesa at Dawn (Ukraine) & Kevin Chen’s Ghost Town, tr. Darryl Sterk (Taiwan)

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Yes, it’s been a while. I’ve been laid low with Covid (now better), which knocked all sorts of things off course (alas). So here’s a very random selection of crime-related goodies, starting with the excellent new short story collection Marple…

Marple, Harper Collins 2022
First line: ‘I wonder, sometimes, if there isn’t a concentration of evil in small places’

I loved this collection of twelve brand-new Miss Marple stories, written by a talented group of crime writers from all around the world: Naomi Alderman, Leigh Bardugo, Alyssa Cole, Lucy Foley, Elly Griffiths, Natalie Haynes, Jean Kwok, Val McDermid, Karen M. McManus, Dreda Say Mitchell, Kate Mosse, and Ruth Ware.

According to a Guardian piece on Marple, the authors were given some ground rules before they started writing: “Firstly, the stories had to be set within the period covered by Agatha Christie’s own Miss Marple fiction. They could draw on characters and situations that occurred in any of the Marple novels and short stories, but weren’t allowed to incorporate characters or events from any of Christie’s non-Marple books, nor to invent any backstory upon which Christie herself had not touched.”

That said, there was still plenty of scope for the authors to have fun, with Miss Marple solving crimes everywhere from a friend’s front garden to Italy, Manhattan and Singapore. Each of the stories captures the essence of Miss Marple’s keen intellect and sharp eye, and finds a balance between paying homage to Christie’s crime icon and taking her to new places.

After finishing Marple, I couldn’t resist re-reading Agatha Christie’s 13 Problems, first published in 1932, which introduces Miss Marple to readers in thirteen interlocking stories. We join a group of friends, each of whom offers up a knotty mystery for the rest of the group to solve – and of course it’s the unassuming Victorian spinster in their midst who gets to the heart of the matter every time. The collection is still an absolute delight, showcasing Christie’s lively plotting, characterisation and humour.

Sally McGrane, Odesa at Dawn (V&Q Books 2022)
First line: ‘Mr Smiley was a fat, dirty cat, with ragged mouse-coloured fur, mottled with a darker shade of rat’

Sally McGrane is a freelance writer and journalist based in Berlin, who wrote her thriller on site, in the Black Sea port of Odesa, where she had previously worked. The whole thing reads like an wonderful, off-kilter love letter to the Ukrainian city, whose mercurial nature is reflected in its complex history, unique inhabitants and catacomb-riddled foundations.

Odesa at Dawn is set in an earlier, more peaceful time, before the current Russian invasion, but with Ukrainian-Russian tensions bubbling beneath the surface. It opens with Mr Smiley rescuing his favourite human Sima from a bombing, and I’m hopeful that this moggy’s name pays homage to John le Carré’s most famous creation. Engaging ex-CIA agent Max Rushmore plays a central role in the proceedings: he is back in the city to investigate something murky, and gets pulled into something even murkier, including a convoluted crime-family saga.

I particularly loved McGrane’s sparky, wry, highly observant writing style, which is freewheeling in all the best ways. Here’s a short extract that showcases its capacity for humour and absurd, oddly moving details:

“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen footage of Gagarin’s life,’ said Albu, after he’d half sunk, half fallen into his faux-leather seat. ‘He grew up in a hut, literally a wooden hut. I think perhaps they had a goat.’ The Romanian paused, shifted his large black shoes. ‘Only a deep capacity for mystical belief could have taken that village boy and sent him to the heavens in a spaceship.

The curvy, earnest girl reappeared carrying a tray. She set three thin white cups on a glass table. The tea was transparent, with a high sour taste, garnished with the East’s eternal, heartbreakingly pale slice of lemon.”

Kevin Chen, Ghost Town, tr. Darryl Sterk, Europa Editions (Taiwan)
First line: “Where are you from?”

Ghost Town is a story of a young Taiwanese man and his family, but is also packed to the rafters with crime. The young man in question, Keith Chen, the second son of a family of seven, returns home after serving a prison sentence in Berlin for killing his boyfriend. The truth of that story emerges in the course of the novel, alongside the stories of his parents and siblings, who struggle to find their identities or happiness in the village of Yongjing (which ironically means ‘eternal peace’) as it starts to modernise.

This is the first Taiwanese novel I’ve ever read, and it paints a fascinating portrait of a small community in transition, and of the nature and climate of rural Taiwan. There’s also clever use of the Ghost Festival to explore the titular ghost town of Yongjing, and how individuals who have lost their way can feel ‘ghostly’ in their own lives. Like Odesa at Dawn, this is a highly original, lively and imaginative novel that’s a feast for the curious reader. Hats off to translator Darryl Sterk, who finds ways to weave Taiwanese and Mandarin terms into the narrative, thereby illuminating key phrases and cultural details.

The Long Con: Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel (Canada) and the Liar Liar podcast (Australia). Plus: our Punishment Giveaway winners!

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Sometimes random themes emerge across books and podcasts, and before you know it, you’ve fallen down a fascinating rabbit hole — in this case the world of financial crime.

After my fellow crime aficionado Susie G. mentioned that characters from Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility had featured in her previous novel The Glass Hotel, I decided to take a look. And indeed, here is the much fuller story of brother and sister Paul and Vincent, the former a troubled young composer, the latter a rootless young woman catapulted into the world of the ultra-rich after marrying the owner of the hotel where she was a bartender. Alas, things soon go awry: it’s not too long before she’s catapulted back out again when a giant Ponzi scheme implodes in New York…

Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel (Picador 2020)
First line: Begin at the end.

This is a novel about all sorts of things vanishing — money, people, relationships, futures. It painstakingly explores how people kid themselves about what they do or don’t know, or allow themselves to be pulled into something dodgy or shady or too good to be true. As always, St. John Mandel weaves together the messy, fascinating stories of people’s lives with great empathy, but is also unsparing about people’s weaknesses and the heavy price of fraud, whether paid by those who perpetrate it or by their highly unfortunate victims. The Ponzi scheme at the heart of the novel draws on New York financier Bernie Madoff’s infamous swindle, which lasted decades and involved an eye-watering $50 billion.

Then I tumbled into the Liar Liar podcast, hosted by journalists Kate McClymont and Tom Steinfort. In the course of ten episodes, they examine the staggering case of Melissa Caddick, an outwardly successful Sydney businesswoman who spent years defrauding investors — mainly family and friends — with an elaborate Ponzi scheme of her own.

At the heart of this story lie the following questions: what kind of person systematically defrauds (among many others) her own parents and the best friend she has known since childhood? What kind of person takes $23 million of other people’s retirement savings and blows them on a lavish house, cars, jewellery, shoes, ski trips to Aspen, while still cheerily attending their birthday parties? What happens when lies infuse every aspect of a person’s professional and personal life so completely that nothing else really remains?

The core strength of Liar Liar is its granular examination of Caddick’s evolution as a con artist and the specific techniques she used (sadly, preying on those closest to you is a hallmark of fraudsters, because it’s easier for them to exploit the existing bonds and trust between you). It also deliberately and rightly makes space for Caddick’s victims to relate the horrendous personal consequences of her crimes: the devastation of retirement savings being wiped out, the bleak financial futures many now face, together with the emotional fallout of having had one’s trust so comprehensively betrayed. A sad and cautionary tale.

Last but not least, I can announce the three winners of Mrs Peabody’s Punishment Giveaway competition. Congratulations to Lisa D., Iain M., and Sarah Q! Copies of the book will be winging their way to you shortly 🙂

Publication Giveaway! Ferdinand von Schirach’s PUNISHMENT, tr. Katharina Hall (Germany)

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Ferdinand von Schirach, Punishment, trans. from the German by Katharina Hall, Baskerville 2022

First line: Katharina was raised in the Upper Black Forest.

Well, this isn’t your standard Mrs. Peabody review, because for the first time in eleven years of blogging I’m the translator of the featured book! So here’s a bit about this bestselling German author and his work, followed by details of a scrumptious Punishment Publication Giveaway!

Some of you may already have read works by German defence-lawyer-turned-writer Ferdinand von Schirach. He came to prominence in the English-speaking world with his debut novel The Collini Case (tr. Anthea Bell), a gripping page-turner that asked some big legal and ethical questions of post-war Germany.

Alongside other novels, plays and TV dramas, von Schirach has also published three collections of crime stories, the latest of which is Punishment. I’ve always had a soft spot for von Schirach’s short stories, which (to a greater or lesser degree) draw on his own experiences and observations of the German justice system. He’s a master of the form, creating punchy tales based on fascinating premises and scenarios.

Punishment features 12 stories, 12 crimes, 12 punishments, each of which raises complex questions about morality, justice, and what it means to be human in extremis – whether you’re a young woman, defence lawyer, bereaved mother, lonely widower, school boy, supermarket manager, disgruntled wife or simply a devoted friend. By turns hard-hitting, moving and darkly humorous, these stories and fates will stay with you for a long time to come.

Six of the stories have just been adapted for TV by German channel RTL, and premiered at this year’s CANNESSERIES festival. These stills will give you a flavour…

And here are a couple of snippets from Christian House’s recent review of Punishment in the Financial Times ‘Best Books of the Week’ section:

I’m delighted the reviewer chose to highlight the humour of this particular story, as I think von Schirach’s talent for deadpan comedy often gets overlooked!

There’s also a lovely vlog review by Victoria Heldt – it’s a 10/10 from her…

AND NOW TO OUR PUNISHMENT GIVEAWAY…

To celebrate the publication of Punishment, Mrs. Peabody has three copies of the book to give away! If you are in the UK and would like to enter, just answer the following question in the comments below: what was the title of Ferdinand von Schirach’s debut novel?

The draw will take place on Saturday 27 August and winners will be contacted directly. Good luck! Viel Glück!

Finally, for those of you interested in the experience of translating Punishment, take a look at my piece over on Crime Time, which discusses the pleasures and challenges of the process!

The Giveaway competition has now closed 🙂

Summer smörgåsbord of crime

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The big work deadlines have been met, so it’s time to wind down with some summer crime…

I recently treated myself to two crime novels from the wonderful selection at Orenda Books: Vanda Symon’s Overkill and Antti Tuomainen’s The Rabbit Factor (translated from the Finnish by David Hackston).

So far I’ve read the excellent Overkill, the first in Symon’s ‘Sam Shephard’ series, which is set in rural New Zealand. When young mother Gaby Knowes goes missing in odd circumstances, Sam, the police constable with sole responsibility for the small town of Mataura, is called in to investigate. After Gaby is found washed up dead on the river bank, things get very complicated, not least because Gaby’s husband is Sam’s ex. Now, as well as having to untangle what happened to Gaby, Sam has to prove that she had no involvement in events herself.

Sam is a really great character: down-to-earth, self-deprecating and smart as a whip (as is her long-suffering flatmate Maggie). I hugely enjoyed the novel’s depiction of small-town New Zealand life and its nature, and the resolution to the mystery was very satisfying as well.

Mick Herron has just won the 2022 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award for his thriller Slough House, the seventh in the ‘Slough House / Slow Horses’ series. It was actually Mick’s fifth shortlisting for the award in six years, so this must have been a particularly satisfying win, and was possibly helped along by the new TV adaptation featuring Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. I’m a big fan of the series, which I always think of as an off-beat successor to John le Carre’s ‘Smiley’ novels. How funny that Gary Oldman has now played both Smiley and Lamb!

As it happens, I’ve just read Herron’s Dolphin Junction (Baskerville 2021), a wonderful set of stories starring both Jackson Lamb and the investigative duo Joe Silverman / Zoë Boehm. Highly enjoyable and perfect for lounging in the park on a warm summer’s day.

There’s another set of short stories out on 18 August from Baskerville: Punishment by German defence-lawyer-turned-writer Ferdinand von Schirach. The translator is my good self (as readers of this blog may know, I left academia in 2016, and have worked as a professional translator and editor since then). I can’t wait for Punishment to be out in the big wide world, and will tell you lots more about this unforgettable book on publication day. In the meantime, you can find out more here.

Wishing you all lovely summer days and happy reading!

From Napoli to Nottinghamshire: Italian crime novel The Bastards of Pizzofalcone & BBC crime drama Sherwood

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Maurizio de Giovanni, The Bastards of Pizzofalcone, tr. from the Italian by Antony Shugaar (Europa Editions 2015) 

First line: Giuseppe Lojacono was sitting in the squad car, in the passenger seat, back straight, hands motionless on his thighs.

It’s been a while since I read some Italian crime fiction, so Maurizio de Giovanni’s The Bastards of Pizzofalcone was a perfect fit: the first in a series about a ragtag group of police officers who are thrown together after being transferred to the troubled Pizzofalcone police precinct in Naples.

The precinct’s former, corrupt officers have been packed off in disgrace, so it’s up to the new guys to rescue its reputation. There’s Giuseppe Lojacono, a Sicilian with fine investigative instincts and a chequered past; Marco Aragona, a suntanned rich kid who acts like he’s a film star; Ottavia Calabrese, a computer genius with an oppressive home life, Francesco Romano, a terse chap with anger management issues; Giorgio Pisanelli, an old-timer obsessed with a set of suicides he thinks are murders; Allesandra Di Nardo, a firearms whizz stifled by her family’s conformity, and the ever steady Commissario Luigi Palma, better known as Gigi. Together, they are the Bastards of Pizzofalcone.

The novel is billed as ‘noir’, but I’m not sure that’s totally accurate. The emphasis is very much on character and on the mechanics of investigating various cases: the murder of a wealthy notary’s wife, a suspected kidnapping, the alleged suicides. The acknowledgements reveal that the author is a fan of Ed McBain, and I think that offers us a great way to see this novel – as the first in a modern, Neapolitan ’87th Precinct’ series. There’s also a TV adaptation – here’s a nice introductory snippet with subtitles…

Chain of evidence: from Napoli to Nottinghamshire

Reading The Bastards of Pizzofalcone made me think about other Italian crime novels I’ve loved. This led me to my earlier post on Roberto Costantini’s The Deliverance of Evil (Quercus), which is the first in a trilogy. The post contains an extensive list of crime trilogies and quartets, such as David Peace’s astonishing ‘Red Riding Quartet’ (Serpent’s Tail), set in Yorkshire. Peace also wrote a novel called GB84 about the 1984 miners’ strikes. And that brings us to the BBC crime drama Sherwood, set in Nottinghamshire around 2014, in a community fractured by the strikes thirty years before…

This six-part series has just concluded, and I can highly recommend it for its wonderfully rich storylines, its historical and social insights, and its absolutely stellar cast, including David Morrissey, Robert Glenister and Lesley Manville. Writer James Graham grew up in the area, and fuses a genuine case (the murder of a man with a crossbow) with the history of the miners’ strikes and the ‘spycops’ scandals (an early example of how seeding discord into a community can ‘divide and conquer’ it for decades). It’s fast-paced, hard-hitting, twisty, and genuinely moving at times. Loved it.

Kalmann, Northern Spy and Edith! – crime from Iceland, Northern Ireland & the USA (with bonus bit on the 2022 CWA Daggers)

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Joachim B. Schmidt, Kalmann, tr. by Jamie Lee Searle, Bitter Lemon Press 2022

First lines: If only grandfather had been with me. He always knew what to do.

I hugely enjoyed this Icelandic mystery by Swiss author Joachim Schmidt (who lives in Iceland), splendidly translated by Jamie Lee Searle from the original German.

Our narrator is Kalmann, a neurodivergent young man who is the self-appointed Sheriff of Raufarhöfn, a tiny village in the north-east of the country – right up by the Arctic Circle – also home to the striking Arctic Henge.

Image by Mercator1512

It’s here that Kalmann is shaken by the sight of a pool of blood and faint footsteps leading off into the snow. When local entrepreneur Róbert is found to have disappeared, the police become extremely interested in what Kalmann saw and has to say…

Schmidt deftly sidesteps any kind of Forrest Gump sentimentality, allowing Kalmann’s highly original worldview to draw readers in. He reminded me a little of a grown-up Christopher from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, but with a very Icelandic twist: he’s a crack hunter of Arctic foxes and gigantic Greenland sharks, and an expert at making the fermented delicacy hákarl – which I’m reliably told is an acquired taste… We also get to know Kalmann’s family and his community, which is grappling with a number of economic challenges and social changes. I particularly liked the depiction of Kalmann’s relationship with his beloved grandfather, and how he has to work out how to handle this very tricky situation without the latter’s guidance.

Flynn Berry, Northern Spy, Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2021

First lines: We are born with a startle reflex. Apparently it’s caused by the sensation of falling.

Tessa, a producer at the Belfast bureau of the BBC, is at work one day when she sees a news clip on screen. As the anchor appeals for witnesses to an armed robbery at a petrol station, Tessa’s sister Marian appears in the footage, pulling a black ski mask over her face.

Two decades have passed since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that secured peace in Northern Ireland. But some IRA splinter groups are still active, and now Tessa must face the possibility that Marian has been living a double life that endangers her and her family. It’s the start of a journey in which Tessa must balance her loyalty to her sister, her young son, and the community she lives in, while navigating the most complex situation of her life. It’s a thoroughly engrossing and illuminating read.

Some reviewers have compared this novel with le Carré’s work and I think that’s justified. Berry is very good on how individuals find themselves getting pulled into complex intelligence situations, and how powerful organizations lure people in, but then use them and spit them out. That’s something we very much see in le Carré as well (e.g. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; The Looking Glass War). But the angle here is a new one: events as viewed by a young mother for whom there is a huge amount at stake — and this gives Northern Spy original depth.

As an aside — Tessa and Marian’s relationship had strong echoes for me of Juliane and Marianne’s relationship in Margarethe von Trotta’s 1981 film Die bleierne Zeit (Leaden Times), about two sisters in 1968-era Germany who take very different political paths. A possible inspiration?

Edith! A scripted podcast from Crooked Media

I stumbled on this ‘scripted podcast’ (aka serialised drama) on Spotify while I was browsing the other day. It turned out to be a bit of a gem – a very witty exploration of a curious bit of American history between 1919 and 1921: the cover-up of President Woodrow Wilson’s stroke by his wife Edith, and the very real possibility that the First Lady misled elected officials and assumed the presidential mantle of power herself — which of course would have been both unconstitutional and a federal crime. Rosamund Pike (of Gone Girl fame) is excellent in the role of Edith, and is backed by an great cast, especially Esther Povitsky as the unforgettable Trudie Grayson.

And finally…

The CWA 2022 Daggers were announced on Wednesday at a glittering ceremony in London. You can see all the winners here on the Waterstones / Daggers site.

I was delighted to see wonderful German crime writer Simone Buchholz win the CWA Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger for Hotel Cartagena (Orenda Books). It’s the fourth in the ‘Chas Riley’ series to be published in English, all translated by Rachel Ward, who captures the noirish P.I. cadence of the novels perfectly.

Simone appeared on one of the Krimi panels I chaired at CrimeFest a few years ago and was great! You can read a wide-ranging Mrs P interview with her here.

Hotel Cartagena - Chastity Riley 4 (Paperback)