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!