Review by New York Times Review
Every college has its golden lads and lasses who take pleasure in breaking the hearts of freshmen from more humble social ranks. That's why we have first novels - to let those freshmen pour out their tales of terrible and wonderful collegiate crushes. THE NIGHT CLIMBERS (Simon Spotlight Entertainment/Simon & Schuster, $24), a book written by Ivo Stourton when he was barely out of Cambridge, sets some familiar scenes - languid floating picnics on the Cam, fox hunts at dawn, private clubs and manicured cricket lawns - filled with dauntingly rich and impossibly beautiful people. But Stourton adds his own distinctive touch by giving his undergraduate hedonists a taste for a dangerous sport: the scaling of college buildings by night, an apt metaphor for the breathtaking sense of superiority claimed by their privileged social set. James Walker, the son of a man of modest means, thinks he will die if he can't swan about in the company of the aristocratic playboy Francis Manley; his cool blond girlfriend, Jessica Katz; and their elite coterie of upper-class friends. But for all his freshman innocence, James is a youth of cunning and guile; once initiated into their "shadowy, glamorous world," he sets his sights higher, aiming to win their acceptance and validation. When Francis, disinherited after a stunt so reckless that he finally attracts his father's notice, proposes an audacious criminal enterprise to raise millions, James falls right in with it. Narrating the story in the present day, after learning that this old crime may yet be discovered, James is a richer but much diminished man, addicted to pornography and expensive prostitutes. But he's still fixated on the past and enthralled by Francis and Jessica, whose exclusive relationship shut him out "like a locked room in my own home." An assured stylist, Stourton adopts a voice of mannered elegance that captures James's pretentiousness and Francis's natural grace, although he stiffens up when delivering jejune observations about social restraints on freedom and imagination. A more telling statement is conveyed when these heedless children are seen cutting lines of cocaine on the glass of a framed Picasso drawing. No one would accuse James Swain of writing mandarin prose; in fact, he uses language with such blunt force he could be hammering in nails. But that's just the sort of directness you want in a story like MIDNIGHT RAMBLER (Ballantine/Random House, $24.95), a sturdy thriller featuring Jack Carpenter, an excop who finds missing children for understaffed police forces all over Florida. In broad outline, the guy is pretty much a cliché: drummed out of the force for putting a sex pervert in the hospital, estranged from his wife, living alone with his ugly dog over a sleazy bar and always broke. But like Tony Valentine, the gaming consultant who sniffs out crooked play in gambling casinos in a popular Swain series, Carpenter has uncanny gifts in his chosen field, and he uses them here in the dogged pursuit of a serial killer who leaves no traces of his abducted victims. Even more intriguing, perhaps, are the cases - like the disappearance of an infant from a pediatrics ward - that the tough-guy hero solves on the fly and with no apparent mental sweat. Scandinavian crime writers tend to be gloomy, but they don't all sound alike, as three new northerly novels make plain. Arnaldur Indridason's bleakly beautiful fiction probably comes closest to the depressive sensibility you might expect to find in Iceland. In VOICES (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95), it's the Christmas tourist season, and Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson and his colleagues on the Reykjavik police force are called to a hotel to investigate the stabbing death of the house Santa Claus, who was also the doorman. Appalled by the mean little room where the man was housed, and by the indifference of both management and staff, Erlendur tries to dignify this forgotten soul by solving his murder - a job that uncovers some melancholy realities about the mistreatment of children. Although also set in Reykjavik at Christmastime, Yrsa Sigurdardottir's LAST RITUALS (Morrow, $23.95) is more of an academic detective story, with a bright young lawyer, Thora Gudmundsdottir, doing the snooping. Thora undertakes a historical survey course in Icelandic black magic after a German exchange student who wrote his thesis on the execution of children suspected of sorcery is ritualistically murdered and mutilated. After learning that the student was involved in a society named after "Malleus Maleficarum," an ancient (and famously gruesome) handbook on the proper inquisition of witches, Thora heads for a remote, rural region where the manual may still be in use. Fanciful, yes, but history is more fun when it's horrid. Mari Jungstedt's UNSPOKEN (St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95) presents itself as a classic police procedural featuring a conventional cop, the stern and sober Detective Superintendent Anders Knutas, who keeps the peace in Visby, a medieval city on the Swedish resort island of Gotland. But the narrative voice is so intimate that the book is best described as a suspense story. As such, it's nicely written, with interesting characters and a crackling good tale about neglected and lonely children who become the prey of pedophiles. At the same time, the plot is ripe with extraneous details about the private lives and romantic adventures of anyone even remotely involved in the criminal investigation - so ripe that you tend to forget exactly what it is you're supposed to be reading in the first place. Ivo Stourton gives his undergraduates a taste for a dangerous sport: scaling college buildings by night.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
The enthusiasm generated by Indridason's first two novels starring Reykjavík police inspector Erlendur Sveninsson Jar City (2005) and Silence of the Grave (2006) was reminiscent of the buzz that launched Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander when he arrived in the U.S. a decade ago. The third in Indridason's series will add more volume to the word of mouth. Erlendur and his colleagues are called to a Reykjavík hotel where the doorman, dressed as Santa Claus, has been found stabbed to death, with his red pants around his knees. The investigation uncovers that the victim was once a child singing star. How did the onetime choirboy with the chrystalline voice become a debased Santa? As Erlendur probes into the Santa's past and the habits of the hotel's employees, he rekindles still-painful memories of his brother's death and his failures as a father. Hovering over the whole is the false cheer of Christmas, serving only to ratchet up the depression level in tortured souls on both sides of the law. A grim but compelling look at how the stranglehold of the past cripples our ability to live in the present.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Gold Dagger Award-winner Indridason stumbles in his third Reykjavik thriller to feature Insp. Erlendur Sveinsson (after 2006's Silence of the Grave). A few days before Christmas, Erlendur and his colleagues, El!nborg and Sigurdur Oli, look into the scandalous murder of Gudlaugur, a local Santa Claus, at a busy hotel. As Erlendur and his team scramble to find a motive for the seemingly senseless crime, disturbing secrets from Gudlaugur's past begin to surface. In a hotel full of foreign holiday guests, Erlendur investigates everyone from a slippery British record collector to a sullen maid who reminds Erlendur of his own daughter. Snippets of a previous investigation involving child abuse distract from the Gudlaugur case. Despite a drawn-out climax where Erlendur tries to put all the pieces together, most readers will predict the terrible secret that led to Gudlaugur's death. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Indridason turns introspective in his third mystery translated into English (after the award-winning Jar City and Silence of the Grave), a thriller that occurs over just six days before Christmas. In the midst of the holiday rush at a Reykjavik hotel, the doorman who portrays Santa Claus is found stabbed in his basement room, in costume and wearing a condom with his pants around his ankles. When Inspector Erlendur learns that the victim was once a celebrated choirboy who was never able to experience a real childhood, he's reminded of the death of his younger brother in a blizzard, which he himself survived. Erlendeur also has to deal with his drug-addicted daughter mourning the recent loss of her baby and a child abuse case involving an eight-year-old boy, which takes a turn that distresses Erlendur's colleague Elinborg. A long-divorced loner, Erlendur takes residence in the hotel, weighing motives of greed and hatred and developing a promising romantic relationship while coworkers worry about his lack of Christmas plans. An exceptional psychological study-Erlendur struggles with his past and his present-this won the Martin Beck Award in Sweden for the best crime novel in translation. In Jungstedt's second mystery (after Unseen), Detective Superintendent Anders Knutas of Gotland has both a murdered alcoholic photographer and a missing 14-year-old girl on his hands. Along with his closest colleague, Detective Inspector Karin Jacobsson, Knutas is assisted by smitten reporter Johan Berg, who turns up leads as he pursues married Emma Winarve, whose bond to her children has her vacillating between her lover and her husband. Inevitably, the two cases are found to be linked-and become painfully personal for Knutas. Jungstedt's portrayal of the victims-particularly of young biracial Fanny Jansson, daughter of a single alcoholic mother-are especially sharp, as she continues to develop the characters from her debut novel. The result is a more polished sequel and ending with a cliff-hanger that whets interest for her next. Featuring perpetrators acting out of desperation and a certain insularity with their island locales, both novels are recommended for collections where dark, foreign mysteries are popular, but probably not for holiday reading.-Michele Leber, Arlington, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Who killed Santa Claus? Reykjav"k police inspector Erlendur, with sidekicks Sigurdur Óli and Elinborg, is summoned to a posh hotel to investigate the murder of Gudlaugur Egilsson, found stabbed in his modest basement digs with a condom hanging from his "ditty." Saliva samples are taken of guests and employees, none of whom admits personally knowing the 50-ish doorman/handyman. But the hotel manager sheepishly acknowledges that he'd just fired Gudlaugur, apparently leaving him with no other prospects. A little digging reveals a remarkable story. Gudlaugur was a boy soprano with a brief but spectacular career. Indeed, hotel guest Henry Wapshott had come all the way from England to meet him. Talking to Gudlaugur's estranged father and sister and his old choirmaster Gabr"el fills in many details of Gudlaugur's fall from fame, which involved an embarrassing public performance and a subsequent battle with his father so fierce that it left the old man confined to a wheelchair. The case affects Erlendur strangely. Suddenly very tired, he takes a room at the hotel, has obsessive thoughts about his broken family (in a hilarious scene, his drug-addicted daughter Eva Lind, visiting him in his room, is mistaken by hotel staff for a prostitute) and edges toward an affair with Valgerdur, an attractive crime-scene technician. Another top-notch mystery from Indridason (Silence of the Grave, 2006, etc.), its lyrical melancholy matched by the depth of its characterizations. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
