Read the first chapter of Reykjavik Nights here
THE Icelandic author Arnaldur Indridason has created one of the most accomplished series of detective novels in modern crime fiction. His last book, Strange Shores, seemed to mark an end to the series but Indridason is too interested in his gloomy detective, Erlendur, to let him go. Reykjavik Nights, translated by Victoria Cribb (Harvill Secker £16.99 / ST Bookshop price £14.99 / ebook £17.72), is a prequel to the series, set at the beginning of Erlendur’s career.
Working mainly at night, the young Erlendur is called out to traffic accidents and burglaries. Always ready to offer an unofficial night in a cell to a homeless person, he is troubled when one of the recipients of his generosity is found dead in a quarry. Quietly pursuing his own investigation, Erlendur links the man’s death to the unsolved disappearance of a young woman. The novel fills in gaps in Erlendur’s biography, but the best thing about it is Indridason’s empathy with victims of crime.
Roberto Costantini writes huge novels, both in terms of length and the ambition of his plots. The Root of All Evil, translated by NS Thompson (Quercus £18.99 / ST Bookshop price £16.99 / ebook £9.49), is the second volume of his Commissario Balistreri trilogy, harking back to when his detective was growing up in post-colonial Libya. Balistreri’s father was a successful businessman in Tripoli, involved in the machinations that brought Colonel Gadaffi to power.
The first book in the trilogy, The Deliverance of Evil, was set in Rome many years later and showed Balistreri making a mess of a murder investigation. He is hard to like — sexist and careless of other people’s feelings — but the new novel reveals he was traumatised by the murder of a neighbour’s daughter and the death of his mother in Libya. The plot races along, even if Costantini’s female characters never really come to life.
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The West Virginia coal mines were cramped places, leaving some ex-miners unable to stand upright. Julia Keller has used a true story, about a miner’s wife who tried to create a refuge for her husband under the kitchen table, in her powerful new novel, Summer of the Dead (Headline £14.99 / ST Bookshop price £13.49 / ebook £7.49). Lindy lives with her widowed father in Acker’s Gap, where she has turned their basement into a replica of the mine he used to work in. Lindy works in a petrol station, but she reads avidly and does her best to cope with her father’s increasing dementia. When a couple of local people are murdered, her father becomes a suspect. Keller knows small-town life inside out, and the book is full of memorable characters and plot twists.
One of the most difficult tasks for a crime writer is coming up with an original motive. The Swedish author Lars Kepler (actually the pen name of Alexander Ahndoril and Alex-andra Coelho Ahndoril) pulls it off in The Sandman, translated by Neil Smith (Blue Door £16.99 / ST Bookshop price £14.99 / ebook £8.49). Jurek Walter is a serial killer, serving a life sentence in the secure wing of a hospital. His modus operandi was to kidnap his victims and keep them in excruciating conditions before they died or were dispatched.
The book begins with one of Walter’s victims, an emaciated young man, staggering across a bridge near Stockholm during a blizzard. The boy and his sister disappeared, presumed drowned, seven years earlier. Now it seems that the youngsters have been held in a concrete bunker all this time. Kepler’s plots are always thrilling, but The Sandman is one of the most hair-raising crime novels published this year.
Anthony Quinn’s widely anticipated second novel Disappeared (Head of Zeus £12.99 / ST Bookshop price £11.69 / ebook 99p) is set in Northern Ireland. A former detective vanishes from the remote cottage he shares with his sister. Another man, who used to be an informer, is tortured to death. This is a tough yet lyrical novel, evoking a desperate period of Irish history when paramilitaries “disappeared” people they suspected of cooperating with the authorities.