Category Archives: South Korea

Spring smörgåsbord! Swiss, Korean, British, Spanish & American crime fiction

Posted on by Kat Hall
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Spring is springing here in Wales, with pink blossom, white garlic, and bluebells emerging into the warmth. It does the soul good to be out in the garden and parks, or down on the beach.

I’ve been enjoying an eclectic range of crime fiction recently, including some longer, more ambitious reads.

Hunkeler's Secret

Hansjörg Schneider, Hunkeler’s Secret (Switzerland), tr. by Astrid Freuler, Bitter Lemon Press 2025

First line: Peter Hunkeler, former inspector with the Basel City criminal investigation department, now retired, woke up and didn’t know where he was.

I reckon Hunkeler’s Secret, the latest in the ‘Inspector Hunkeler’ series, is my favourite thus far. While in hospital recovering from an operation, Hunkeler finds himself sharing a room with Stephan Fankhauser, the gravely ill former head of the Basel Volksbank. One morning, Hunkeler wakes to the news that Fankhauser died in the night. But was it a natural death? Or did a groggy Hunkeler witness something untoward being done to his fellow patient in the wee small hours? After his discharge from hospital, the retired police inspector starts to investigate in his dogged, somewhat grumpy way. There’s also a new family relationship to explore, a wayward goat, and lots of good food.

One aspect of the ‘Hunkeler’ series I particularly like is its geographical setting. There’s the Swiss city of Basel on the one hand, where Hunkeler spent his working life and has a flat, and rural Alsace on the other, where he owns a little house. You get a real sense of the proximity of Switzerland, France and Germany to one another, with characters continually criss-crossing borders and speaking Swiss-German, Alsatian (an Alemannic dialect) and French. I love that Astrid Freuler integrates nuggets of the original languages into her excellent English translation, which gives readers an enhanced sense of the multiculturalism of the area. The region also has a complex territorial history, which plays a role in the resolution of this knotty Hunkeler case.

Jess Kidd, Murder at Gulls Nest (1950s England), Faber 2025

First line: The woman climbs the hill, a favourable wind behind her.

Murder at Gulls Nest is the first in Jess Kidd’s new ‘Nora Breen Investigates’ series, and is set in the 1950s seaside town of Gore-on-Sea, a place of boarding houses, terrible food, and recalibration after long years of war.

For thirty years, Nora was Sister Agnes of Christ, a dutiful nun at the High Dallow Carmelite Monastery. But when former nun Frieda goes missing, Nora feels compelled to find her, and takes a room at the Gulls Nest boarding house, where the young woman was last based. Here, Nora meets the ragtag assortment of Frieda’s fellow lodgers, and starts using her curiosity and sharp intelligence to get to the bottom of the mystery. When one of the lodgers is found dead, Nora knows that something is seriously amiss.

Readers of this blog will know that I’m a big fan of Jess Kidd’s work, especially her brilliant novel Himself. Murder at Gulls Nest is written in a slightly softer, slightly cosier style, but retains plenty of bite. As ever, Kidd’s use of language is sublime, and I’m looking forward to meeting the resourceful, irrepressible Nora Breen again in future.

Mirinae Lee, 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster (North Korea and South Korea), Virago 2023

First line: The idea came to me while I was going through my divorce.

When Grandma Mook tells the obituarist at the Golden Sunset retirement home the story of her life — which spans a century of Korea’s history — there’s a suspicion that the old lady is just a fantasist. But: what if Mook Miran is telling the truth and she’s a trickster of the highest order? What if she genuinely was a murderer, terrorist, identity thief and spy?

A major theme of this novel is survival. Mook Miran’s eight lives, which we’re told in non-chronological order, illuminate the terrible hardships women faced in Japanese-ruled Korea (1910-1945) and later in North Korea, and pose the question of what it takes to survive such incredibly adverse circumstances. Part of the answer lies in the figure of the trickster, who survives and advances through nimble thinking and resolute action — even if the latter is viewed as a crime and comes at a price. Sparky, resilient and whip-smart, Mook Miran is a character you won’t easily forget, and the portrait she paints of Korea’s history is disturbing and fascinating in equal measure.

Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road, Faber 2024

First line: Tall and sharp at fifty-two, Campbell Flynn was a tinderbox in a Savile Row suit, a man who believed his childhood was so far behind him that all its threats had vanished.

Caledonian Road, or ‘the Cally’, runs for a mile and a half through the London Borough of Islington. Like many roads in London, it takes you from economically deprived areas to obscenely wealthy ones in what feels like the blink of an eye.

Andrew O’Hagan harnesses the reality of this social divide in his powerful state-of-the-nation novel by creating an illuminating chain of connections: from Milo Mangasha, a tech-savvy student from a Cally council estate, and his uni professor Campbell Flynn, who lives in a posh townhouse with his aristo-therapist wife further up the road, to Sir William Byre, Flynn’s public school pal who’s up to his neck in dodgy deals, and Russian oligarch Aleksandr Bykov and son Yuri, who runs a very modern criminal enterprise and socialises with Campbell’s children. And that’s just a fraction of the cast!

Strap in for 600 pages of brilliant storytelling featuring utterly believable characters and razor-sharp social dissection. In particular, the novel holds up a mirror to the hypocrisies of well-heeled Londoners, and the establishment’s willingness to turn a blind eye to corruption and outright criminality. But it’s not without sympathy for its beleaguered central character, Flynn, whose spectacular mid-life crisis may offer a redemption of sorts, and has much to tell us about the perils of becoming alienated from your true self.

Teresa Solana, Black Storms (Spain), tr. by Peter Bush, Corylus Press 2024

First line: The man who was about to commit murder left home at six thirty, after telling his girlfriend Mary he’d business to see to and checking his car keys were in his pocket.

Whenever I read Teresa Solana’s work, I always come away with an appreciation of her highly distinctive voice, which blends a wry humour with steely social satire. Above all, there’s a wonderful energy to her writing, which seems to feed off the verve of Barcelona, the city where many of her crime stories are set. Her long-time translator, Peter Bush, captures all of these elements with aplomb in his English translations.

Black Storms introduces us to Norma Forester, Deputy Inspector of the Catalan police, who is tasked with solving the murder of an elderly professor at the University of Barcelona. No one can quite understand why a terminally ill man should be targeted in this way, but Norma’s experience and expertise gradually uncover the truth.

Equal attention is paid to Norma’s eccentric family, and they are great fun to hang out with. Norma is the granddaughter of an English member of the National Brigades, and the women of the family, all named after opera heroines, are a force of nature. I particularly like the way Solana shows Norma’s efforts to balance her family life and work, which the latter does in a messy, imperfect, but loving way.

The Residence, Shondaland / Netflix 2025

Last but not least, a very fun Netflix crime series: The Residence, which stars Uzo Aduba as Cordelia Cupp, a consultant with the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, and Randall Park as Edwin Park, an FBI Special Agent. They are called to the White House after a murder is committed during a state dinner for the Australian prime minister, and tasked with figuring out which of the 157 suspects is the murderer — including the fictional president and his husband.

Aduba is excellent as the bird-watching, unerringly brilliant sleuth. It’s really her show, backed by a superb ensemble cast, and the whole thing has a Sherlock-Holmes-by-way-of-Wes-Anderson vibe. It also throws a light on the lives of the permanent staff at the White House, who of course stay in place while presidents come and go. Very sharp, very witty and very entertaining.

C.J. Sansom’s Tombland (1549 England), Suki Kim’s The Interpreter (South Korea/USA), Marcie R. Rendon’s Girl Gone Missing (1970s America)

Posted on by Kat Hall
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C.J. Sansom, Tombland, Mantle 2018

First lines: I had been in my chambers at Lincoln’s Inn when the messenger came from Master Parry, asking me to attend him urgently. I wondered what might be afoot.

I was extremely sad to hear that historical crime writer C.J. Sansom had passed away.

Sansom is, of course, best known for his ‘Matthew Shardlake’ series, featuring the eponymous lawyer-sleuth during the turbulent reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. The final novel in the series, Tombland, takes Shardlake to Norwich in Norfolk, which was England’s prosperous second city at the time. Sent to investigate the murder of Edith Boleyn, a distant relative of the young Princess Elizabeth, Shardlake finds himself caught up in Kett’s Rebellion, a large-scale uprising against wealthy landowners who were appropriating and enclosing ‘common land’, leading to a marked rise in hunger and poverty.

At 880 pages, Tombland is an ambitious and highly absorbing crime novel. If you’ve ever visited Norwich, you’ll immediately recognise many of its locations, such as the 900-year-old Market Square on Gentleman’s Walk and the equally historic Norwich Cathedral. My good friend Harriet informs me that there are now Tombland tours of the city, which sound very appealing indeed.

In addition to a wonderful sense of place, the novel offers a fascinating depiction of Kett’s Rebellion of 1549, which, as Sansom notes in an illuminating afterword, is often overlooked by historians. I found many of the issues he highlights via the uprising — such as the yawning gap between rich and poor, and the devastating effects of a cost-of-living crisis — to be very relevant today. A key difference now, of course, is that ordinary people have the right to vote out governments they don’t like. In fact, the novel could easily be read as an extended argument for the benefits of democracy, which, when working smoothly, enables a transfer of power without the need for brutal conflicts like the Battle of Dussindale.

Here in the UK, you just need to make sure that you are registered to vote (deadline 18 June) and have a valid photo ID when casting your vote in the up-coming election on 4 July 🙂

Suki Kim, The Interpreter, Picador 2003

First line: Cigarette at 9 a.m. is a sure sign of desperation.

Author Suki Kim moved with her family from South Korea to America at the age of thirteen. What it means to navigate this kind of dual heritage forms the starting point for The Interpreter, which can be classified as off-kilter literary crime novel. It depicts an immigrant story that’s a long, long way from the American Dream.

The interpreter in question is 29-year-old Suzy Park, who seems to be leading a largely invisible and emotionally shuttered life in New York. We soon learn that her parents were murdered at their store five years earlier and that the case has never been solved.

While acting as an interpreter in a legal case, Suzy realises that the Korean store owner being questioned on suspicion of breaching employment laws once worked for her parents. Exploiting Mr Lee’s lack of English and the Assistant DA’s lack of Korean, she starts asking questions about her parents’ murder and receives some disquieting answers in return. These set her on the path to uncovering not just the circumstances of the crime, but all kinds of buried truths about her family, and especially her elusive sister Grace.

The Interpreter is a highly interesting novel — an unsparing exploration of Korean-American experiences as well as the impact of generational and culture gaps. The latter are effectively shown in an early scene, when Suzy explains how she translates answers given by first-generation immigrants who use radically different cultural codes from the American lawyers questioning them:

What she possesses is an ability to be in two places at once. She can hear a word and separate its literal meaning from its connotation. […] Languages are not logical. Thus an interpreter must translate word for word and yet somehow manipulate the breadth of language to bridge the gap.

Although Suzy’s identity as an interpreter is central to the text, by the end we are left wondering whether The Interpreter of the title might be someone else entirely. A very clever and well-constructed novel by a fascinating author. You can read more about Suki Kim’s work as a writer and investigative journalist here.

Marcie R. Rendon, Girl Gone Missing, Soho Press 2021 (2019)

First line: Cash pulled herself up and out of her bedroom window.

Girl Gone Missing, the second crime novel featuring Renee ‘Cash’ Blackbear, is set on the Minnesota-North Dakota border in the early 1970s. Cash is just 19, toughened and traumatized by a childhood in foster care after being taken from her Ojibwe family at the age of three. Now navigating the alien but intellectually unchallenging world of college, she continues to drive harvest trucks for farmers and play pool for money, a solitary and safe existence that’s unexpectedly interrupted by the arrival of a long-lost brother. Then, when her writing talents take her to the city for the first time, strange recurring dreams and the odd disappearance of a college girl converge in a way that threaten her directly.

I have a great deal of time for the ‘Cash Blackbear’ series, not least due to the sympathetic yet unsentimental depiction of its lead character. The author tempers an unflinching look at the realities of 1970s Native American experiences — particularly in relation to the trauma of young adults emerging from the foster care system — with the hope of a more positive future. Cash’s resilience, courage and willingness to take decisive action are amply showcased in this novel, and I’m already looking forward to seeing where life takes her in Sinister Graves, the next in the series. If you’re new to the series, then Murder on the Red River is the place to start.

Wishing you all happy summer reading! 

Crime from the International Booker, Netflix & Cannes (Argentina, South Korea, USA)

Posted on by Kat Hall
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Claudia Piñeiro, Elena Knows, tr. from Argentinian Spanish by Frances Riddle, Charco Press 2021 [2007]

First lines: The trick is to lift up the right foot, just a few centimetres off the floor, move it forward through the air, just enough to get past the left foot, and when it gets as far as it can go, lower it. That’s all it is, Elena thinks. 

Elena Knows, by the wonderful Argentinian writer Claudia Piñeiro, packs an unbelievable amount into its 173 pages. Its elderly heroine-detective is Elena, a widow with Parkinson’s whose daughter was recently found dead in the belfry of their church. Elena knows with absolute certainty that Rita, a devout Catholic, wouldn’t have committed suicide, and so embarks on a dogged attempt to investigate the crime. However, her physical limitations keep getting in the way, and when she tries to enlist help from others — Rita’s boyfriend, one of the policemen on the case, a mysterious woman called Isabel — things don’t always go smoothly.

In the course of the novel we accompany Elena on a laborious journey across Buenos Aires, wholly dependent on the levodopa medication that enables her to move. We also observe the journey she takes in her head, which involves discomforting revelations about mother-daughter relationships, female autonomy — especially in relation to the body — and the hypocrisies of Catholicism. Hovering over it all is the question: how much does Elena really know? And what will she find out when she reaches her destination?

Claudia Piñeiro

Claudia Piñeiro is one of Argentina’s top writers, but is best known to English-language readers as a crime author (Betty Boo, A Crack in the Wall). Fiona Mackintosh’s illuminating afterword argues that ‘for Piñeiro, the solving of an individual crime is only half the story; a single crime often metonymically presents corruption at the core of society. As she put it on accepting the Pepe Carvalho Prize, “crime fiction came into being to denounce injustice”, and she claims that nowadays it is impossible to write a crime novel without also writing about the society in which the crime takes place.’

Elena Knows is a book that’s stayed with me for a long time. It’s rightly won a number of prizes and was most recently shortlisted for the International Booker Prize (whose winner on Thursday was Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell).

Our Father, dir. Lucie Jourdan, Netflix 2022

Recently, I watched a documentary called Our Father on Netflix. It overlaps with Elena Knows to a certain extent, because it too explores issues of bodily autonomy and consent in larger religious contexts.

Our Father begins with a chance discovery by a woman called Jacoba Ballard. Following a DNA test, she finds out that she has seven hitherto unknown siblings living close to her in Indiana. She knows immediately that something is wrong, and after considerable detective work establishes that her mother’s fertility doctor, Donald Cline, had used his own sperm to impregnate his patients. And that’s just for starters…

I really liked how the documentary placed Cline’s victims front and centre (especially the children and their mothers), and how it explored the horrific emotional fallout that just one man with a God complex can cause. Jacoba’s grit and courage really shine through: she’s determined to ensure that Cline’s crimes are revealed to the community and that legal changes are made so this can never happen again. Utterly gripping from beginning to end.

The Cannes Film Festival is in full swing at the moment and one of my favourite reviewers, Peter Bradshaw, has been raving about South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s latest offering, the ‘black-widow noir’ Decision to Leave (헤어질 결심) starring Park Hae-il and Tang Wei.

Somewhat unhappily married police detective Hae-Joon is called to investigate a death in the mountains near Busan. There’s something suspicious about the victim’s Chinese wife, Seo-rae, but Hae-joon’s growing fascination with her is such that it starts to interfere with his professionalism and the investigation.

Bradshaw was impressed by the acting of the leads and how freshly this fairly common crime-genre scenario is handled. It gets a coveted 5 stars from him — and is up for the prestigious Palme d’Or. See his full review here.

Other well-reviewed crime films / thrillers at Cannes 2022 include:

Australian true-crime thriller The Stranger (crimson.com review)

Egyptian spy thriller Boy from Heaven (Guardian review)

French crime-comedy-romance The Innocent (Screen Daily review)

Italian gangster drama Nostalgia (Guardian review)

Have you watched any good crime dramas or films lately?

Sisterly devotion: Kwon Yeo-sun’s Lemon, tr. Janet Hong (South Korea)

Posted on by Kat Hall
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Kwon Yeo-sun, Lemon, tr. Janet Hong, Head of Zeus 2021 [2019]

First line: I imagine what happened inside one police interrogation room so many years ago.

This opening line is narrated by a young woman called Da-on, as she reflects on her beautiful older sister’s murder in Seoul on 1 July 2002.

There are two prime suspects, both of whom attended the same high school as victim Hae-on: Shin Jeongjun, the privileged son of wealthy parents, and Han Manu, the son of an impoverished single mum. But while the mystery of what happened to the nineteen-year-old girl is a powerful component in the narrative, its main focus is the impact of Hae-on’s death on those closest to her – her sister, her mother, her classmate. We are shown events unfolding largely through female eyes, in eight pithily titled chapters spanning from 2002 (‘Shorts’) to 2019 (‘Dusk’).

Here’s Da-on, for example, on the early trauma of her sister’s death:

Since both Mother and I were falling at a very slow speed,
I didn't realise we were falling at first.

The women’s grief and their struggle to fill the gap left by the dead girl are very finely drawn. Da-on embarks on two highly original strategies in this respect, each of which ultimately comes with a price – both to her and others – in the seventeen long years following Hae-on’s death.

Interwoven with all this is the theme of class, which is front and centre in other recent examples of crime-inflected South Korean culture, from the Oscar-winning film Parasite to Netflix hits Squid Game and Signal. We’re shown a justice system that’s stacked against those from less well-off backgrounds, and how the rich have more options due to their connections and wealth.

Lemon is a beguiling, unsettling, worthwhile read, which also offers some fascinating glimpses into South Korean culture thanks to Janet Hong’s sensitive and attentive translation.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Kwon Yeo-sun’s work, there’s an interesting interview with her over at Korean Literature Now.

Let it snow! Mrs. Peabody’s 2021 Xmas crime recommendations

Posted on by Kat Hall
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Here are Mrs. Peabody’s 2021 Christmas crime recommendations! 

Treat others! Treat yourself!

Please support local booksellers while keeping yourself and others safe.

Belinda Bauer, Exit (Black Swan, 2021 – UK)

First line: The key was under the mat.

I adore pretty much everything Belinda Bauer has written – she seems capable of turning her hand to almost any kind of crime – and Exit is no exception. Mild-mannered pensioner Felix Pink is an ‘Exiteer’, one of a group of volunteers who keep the ill and infirm company when they decide they’ve had enough of life. But one day an assignment goes horribly wrong, and Felix finds himself needing to stay one step ahead of the police while frantically trying to work out what is going on. Exit tackles weighty issues of life and death with humanity, compassion and a lot of laughs. I’m not sure how Bauer pulls it off, but she emphatically does, and I don’t know anyone who hasn’t loved this impeccably constructed crime novel (including those who claim not to like crime).

Jane Harper, The Survivors (Little, Brown, 2020 – Tasmania)

First line: Kieran hoped the numbness would set in soon.

Two things drew me to this crime novel: its top-notch author and its setting – a little town on Tasmania’s wild coastline. Kieran Elliott is on a rare visit to Evelyn Bay where he grew up. His mother Verity is struggling to look after his father, who has dementia, and the absence of his dead brother Finn looms large both within the family and his wider circle of friends. When Bronte, a young artist working at a cafe, is found dead on the beach, unresolved questions from the past resurface, not least the disappearance of schoolgirl Gabby during the same big storm that claimed Finn’s life. The Survivors is a crime novel that delivers on a number of levels: superb characterization, an absorbing and gripping plot, and a sensitive examination of grief.

Jess Kidd, Things in Jars (Canongate, 2019 – England/Ireland)

First line: The raven levels off into a glide, flight feathers fanned.

Jess Kidd is one of the most original crime authors writing today, both in terms of her subject matter and her rich writing style. Things in Jars is her first ‘proper’ historical crime novel, set in and near London between 1841 and 1863. It features a number of formidable women, chief among them Bridie Devine, ‘the finest female detective of her age’, who begins investigating the kidnapping of a highly unusual child. Oh, and she can see ghosts – specifically, a heavily tattooed boxer (a ‘circus to the eye’) called Ruby Doyle, who claims to have known Bridie in life, and keeps her company through the ups and downs of the case. Filled to the brim with the eccentric, the otherworldly and the gothic, Things in Jars explores female oppression, survival, and how, with the help of allies, women can carve out a space for themselves in a hostile world.

John le Carré, Silverview (Penguin, 2021 – UK)

First line: At ten o’clock of a rainswept morning in London’s West End, a young woman in a baggy anorak, a woollen scarf pulled around her head, strode resolutely into the storm that was roaring down South Audley Street.

For le Carré fans, this is a poignant read – a final novel from the master of the spy genre. In many ways, this is a classic le Carré tale – a forensic deconstruction of one story among the many making up the intelligence world, and a scathing examination of the moral vacuum at the heart of foreign policy. We see events through the eyes of Julian Lawndsley, who has moved to a small seaside town in East Anglia to run a bookshop, and Stewart Proctor, senior intelligence troubleshooter, who gets word of a security breach in the very same spot. At the heart of it all: a mysterious Polish émigré living in ‘Silverview’, a grand manor house. It was a pleasure to be back in le Carré’s world and to spend time with his richly drawn characters. Happily, as with Agent Running in the Field, there are redemptive elements that temper the bleaker aspects of the novel.

Abir Mukherjee, Death in the East (Harvill Secker, 2020 – UK/India)

First line: I’d left Calcutta with a grim resolve, a suitcase full of kerdu gourd, and, in case of emergencies, a bullet-sized ball of opium resin hidden between the folds of my clothes. 

This is the fourth in Mukherjee’s ‘Wyndham and Banerjee’ series, and I think it’s my favourite so far: a rich historical crime novel that offers not just one, but several discrete murder mysteries, including two intriguing locked-room cases. The novel switches between 1922 Assam, where Captain Sam Wyndham is trying to conquer his opium addiction, and 1905 London, during the early days of his policing career. The link: a villain whose reappearance in Assam threatens Wyndham’s life. This is a beautifully plotted crime novel that offers atmospheric depictions of Assam on the one hand and London’s Jewish East End on the other. Gripping, entertaining, and with a nice line in Chandleresque humour, it also shows us the changing face of India – Sergeant Banerjee’s welcome appearance near the end of the novel marks an important shift in the relations between the two.

Hansjörg Schneider, Silver Pebbles, tr. from the German by Mike Mitchell (Bitter Lemon Press, January 2022 – Switzerland)

First line: The Frankfurt-Basel Intercity — a sleek, streamlined train — was crossing the Upper-Rhine plain.

Schneider’s Silver Pebbles was originally published in 1993, but feels remarkably fresh today. The first in the acclaimed ‘Inspector Peter Hunkeler’ series, it introduces us to the jaded Basel police detective and treats us to a wonderfully absorbing case. When Lebanese smuggler Guy Kayat flushes some diamonds down a station toilet to evade the police, he sets off a chain of bizarre events. The diamonds are found by Erdogan, a sewage worker called to clear a blockage, who thinks his dream of opening a hotel back in Turkey is about to come true. But of course, things get complicated… A very human tale, told in a way that reminded me of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s ‘Martin Beck’ series – a matter-of-fact style leavened with genuine warmth and a dry sense of humour. Erika Waldis, Erdogan’s long-suffering girlfriend, is the slow-burning star of the show.

Signal, by Kim Eun-hee, dir. by Kim Won-seok (Netflix – South Korea)

This 2016 South Korean crime drama – with shades of Life on Mars – has stolen my heart. I’m about half way through and love the way it’s developing the ambitious idea of a criminal profiler in 2015 who’s able to talk to a police detective in 1989 via a chunky old walkie-talkie. As well as working on cold cases together, the mystery of the police detective’s own disappearance in 2000 increasingly moves centre stage. Unbeknownst to profiler Park Hae-young, his boss Detective Cha Soo-hyun is also searching for Detective Lee Jae-han – he was her mentor when she was a rookie back in 1989. Along with the police-procedural elements and occasional slapstick humour, it’s Signal‘s wonderfully human characterization that stands out for me.

And here’s a trio on my own Christmas wishlist.

Mick Herron’s Dolphin Junction, a collection of short stories featuring, among others, Jackson Lamb, and Zoë Boehm & Joe Silvermann (the stars of his ‘Slough House’ and ‘Oxford’ series respectively). Expect brilliant storytelling and acerbic wit.

Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, about an interpreter whose duties involve interpreting for a potential war criminal at the International Court in Hague.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s Winter Counts, a much-lauded debut that takes a hard-hitting, nuanced look at life on South Dakota’s Rosebud Indian Reservation.

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There are some big changes coming to Mrs. Peabody Investigates in 2022: keep your eyes peeled for those!

Until then, wishing you all a very Merry Christmas!