The ice princess /

Washington political thrillers are, for he most part, born to be boring. The hero is usually some high-minded lawyer who's become disillusioned after placing his trust in a corrupt government official who happens to be a blood relative. Either that or he's some high-minded former spy who jeopardizes life and pension by coming out of retirement to get mixed up in a preposterous plot involving assassins from unpronounceable nations. The nice thing about Mike Lawson's Washington thrillers is that nobody is high-minded. Certainly not John Fitzpatrick Mahoney, speaker of the House ("and God help the country") and as unscrupulous a politician as you'd hope to find outside a federal prison cell. Nor could you pin that high-and-holy tag on Mahoney's go-to guy, Joe DeMarco, who holes up in a subbasement office of the Capitol building and surfaces only when the speaker has some dirty business that needs to be done. In HOUSE JUSTICE (Atlantic Monthly, $24), Mahoney locks egos with Jacob LaFountaine, the director of the C.I.A., who is apoplectic because someone in government leaked information to a reporter, Sandra Whitmore, that resulted in the execution of a valued undercover agent in Iran. Mahoney has a pretty good idea who tipped the intelligence to Whitmore, who has cheerfully gone to jail to protect her source (and advance her career). But since Mahoney doesn't want it known that he once had an affair with her, there's nothing he can do about this mess - except call for DeMarco to bring his bucket and clean it up. And because Lawson delights in inverting even the most banal of genre conventions, he makes sure that a clandestine meeting between the two men takes place not in a dark bar, but at a kids' ballgame. Once some Russian gangsters muscle into the story, the book meets its own quota for preposterous plot developments. But Lawson's homegrown characters - the ones plucked from that busy intersection inside the Beltway where politics, journalism and big money meet to do business - are so flamboyantly and unapologetically corrupt that no matter what they do, they do it with a certain integrity. When Mahoney looks to a photo of Tip O'Neill for inspiration on how to force a congressman out of office, he's only being true to himself. After a swift run of Nascar novels, Sharyn McCrumb recovers her balladeer voice in THE DEVIL AMONGST THE LAWYERS (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $24.99). While continuing the storytelling tradition of her previous books set in the Southern Appalachians, this new novel jumps back in time to the Depression, when the nation was in the right mood for a sad tale. Erma Morton's story is sad enough, with its lurid details about a young teacher on trial for killing her father - but just wait until the big-city journalists get their hands on it. By the time these snooty visitors have filed their condescending articles about this "hillbilly" coal-mining country, no one would recognize the region's civilized towns and solid citizens. While the plot is too skimpy and the nasty journalists too schematically drawn to sustain this ballad through its last note, the old families who live in proud seclusion up in these hills produce a number of wise souls whose voices are pure poetry. Sorry to rain on the parade of popular authors coming out of Scandinavia, but Swedish citizenship does not automatically confer literary talent on a writer, not even one as widely read as Camilla Lackberg. THE ICE PRINCESS (Pegasus, $25.95), the first of this author's seven crime novels set in the coastal town of Fjallbacka, opens well, with an insider's view of the corrosive forces at work on a small fishing village that is losing its identity as it transforms itself into a tourist resort. But that vision is lost once the focus shifts to the insipid heroine, Erica Falck, a struggling writer who returns home to find that a beloved childhood friend has been murdered. Erica finds plenty of material for a true-crime book ("quite a new phenomenon" in Sweden) once she unearths the shameful secrets harbored by tight-lipped residents of this inbred community. But if her book turns out to be anything like Lackberg's overblown potboiler, with its simplistic characters and stilted language (in Steven T. Murray's cotton-mouthed translation), Sweden's stellar literary reputation might be in trouble. Don't we dearly love bad girls? Hailey Cain, the protagonist of Jodi Compton's HAILEY'S WAR (Shaye Areheart, $22.99), is as tough as the Bates Enforcers ("heavy-soled black lace-ups with a side zip") she wears as a bike messenger in San Francisco. With her conscience in free fall and the law at her back, Hailey hooks up with a friend in a Latina gang and agrees to escort a young Mexican girl across the border and into the mountains of Chihuahua. For all the hairpin turns she takes on this adventure, Hailey proves herself to be a regular straight arrow. Charlie Fox came on strong in Zoë Sharp's early novels but, like a lot of tough girls, softened up with time. Now, thanks to an enterprising small press, we can catch Charlie in the rough. Originally published in 2001, KILLER INSTINCT (Busted Flush, paper, $15) finds this army-trained martial-arts expert on her first job, working security for a club in an English seaside town. Charlie looks like a made-for-TV model, with her red hair and motorcycle leathers, but Sharp means business. The bloody bar fights are bloody brilliant, and Charlie's skills are both formidable and for real. In Mike Lawson's thriller, the speaker of the House needs to hide an affair he once had with a reporter.

*Starred Review* Murray, who has translated the works of both Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, adds another Scandinavian crime star to his résumé with this subtle rendering of Lackberg's debut, a number-one best-seller in Sweden and the winner of France's 2008 Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for Best International Crime Novel. Erica, a thirtysomething biographer struggling with her latest book, deals with her grief over her parents' untimely death and her mixed feelings about returning to her hometown after years in Stockholm. On a whim, she visits her childhood friend Alex only to find her dead in the bathtub. The grieving parents ask Erica to write an article about Alex for a local newsletter, which forces her to try to make sense of her friend's life and death. As Erica delves deeper into Alex's past, she begins to work with a local police officer, Patrik, another childhood friend, and together they uncover secrets that some people would greatly prefer were left secret. Set in winter in the coastal town of Fjallbacka, the novel uses the off-season quiet in the small village many of the houses are empty to create a chilling atmosphere in which silence drives suspense. This excellent thriller is a must-read for fans of Scandinavian crime literature and will especially appeal to those who enjoy Asa Larsson's Rebecka Martinsson novels, as Rebecka and Erica are of a similar age and both return to the remote villages of their childhoods.--Moyer, Jessica Copyright 2010 Booklist

At the start of Lackberg's haunting U.S. debut, the first of her seven novels set in the Swedish coastal town of Fjallbacka, biographer Erica Falck returns home to sort through her deceased parents' belongings and work on her next book. But this is not the same hometown she grew up in. Summer tourists are turning the former fishing village into a thriving resort, and Erica's controlling brother-in-law is pressuring her to cash in by selling the family home. The apparent suicide of childhood friend Alexandra Wijkner contributes to Erica's grief. Once inseparable, they drifted apart before Alex's family abruptly moved away, and Erica feels compelled to write a novel about why the beautiful Alex would kill herself. Lackberg skillfully details how horrific secrets are never completely buried and how silence can kill the soul. A parallel between the town's downward spiral and the fate of one of Fjallbacka's wealthiest families adds texture. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Erica Falck, a local-girl-makes-good writer from the tiny resort town of Fjallbacka, Sweden, stumbles onto a crime scene involving a close childhood friend. Erica is struggling to meet her publisher's deadline on a biography she no longer finds stimulating when her writer's instinct is piqued by her friend's mysterious death. At various points just about everyone in town is implicated, but Erica's senses keep her on the killer's trail, and the result is an ending that comes out of nowhere. Lackberg clearly has a gift for laying out an intricate plot and building suspense. Her list of characters is long and complex but not overwhelming, and she manages successfully to weave in a variety of subplots. VERDICT The winner of several Swedish writing awards, Lackberg has become the best-selling Swedish novelist on record. More Murder She Wrote than noir, her U.S. debut (and the first entry in a seven-book series) will likely appeal to any lover of more lighthearted mysteries. Readers who enjoy Louise Penny's small-town atmosphere may want to give Lackberg a shot. [See Prepub Mystery, LJ 2/1/10.]-Caroline Mann, Univ. of Portland Lib., OR (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A middling mystery by Swedish economist turned novelist Lckberg, a phenom in Europe but hitherto unpublished in the United States.The Germans have a word for the literary genre that sells madly across the continent: Schwedenkrimi, "Swedish crime novels." Never mind that pioneer Peter Heg is Danish; the fact remains that a small squadron of Swedish writers, headed by the late Stieg Larsson and the still-living Henning Mankell, and including Mari Jungstedt, Anna Jansson and Johan Theorin, have made a specialty of blending gruesome murders with seamy side portraits of modern Swedish society, outwardly well scrubbed and orderly, inwardly an ugly mess of avarice, incest and racism. Lckberg's Sweden is a touch less nasty than all that, but the setup is the same: The little village of Fjllbackaa real place on the country's west coastis nice to look at, very dangerous to look into. Erica Falck, a coffee-addicted writer gone to the big city, where she's struggling with a biography of novelist Selma Lagerlf, has returned to her village to attend to her late parents' estate and try to find some peace and quiet in which to work. It's an inspiring place, after all; writes Lckberg, "Each new season brought its own spectacular scenery, and today it was bathed in bright sunshine that sent cascades of glittering light over the thick layer of ice on the sea." But darkness soon descends when Erica's childhood friend, the ethereally beautiful Alexandra Wijkner, turns up dead, the apparent victim of suicide, now lying frozen in a bathtub in an unheated house. Why she would have killed herself is a question that Erica takes up as she prepares a memorial for Alex, a project that turns into a book, then an inquest, now in the company of another childhood friend, a detective. The two turn up the unexpectedwhich, of course, every fan of Schwedenkrimi expectsnamely, the sordidness of the wealthy, the appalling effects of child abuse and the general mayhem that ensues whenever cabin fever sets in.Not as well written as Larsson and Mankell's works, and rather formulaic. Still, good reading for the beach, if not the sauna.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.