The Wisting series of Scandi crime stories have become as comfortable as a snuggly sofa next to a roaring fire on a chilly winter afternoon. Although the cover blurb does its best to sell this carefully constructed mystery as a ‘pulse-pounding thriller’ it has far more in common with Wallander or Varg Veum than Harry…
William Wisting is the latest Norwegian detective to appear on our TV screens, and if you enjoy this style of calculated and complicated investigation then there’s a series of six books to look forward to. The first, Dregs, is very much cut from the same cloth as Wallander or Beck: this is Scandi crime and…
Take a roadtrip with a US Marshall, travel back to Nazi Germany, explore the underbelly of the banking business in Switzerland, discover the strange side of Japanese noir, and meet one of Scandi crime’s finest detectives in his younger years. All this and more in these criminal escapades from international authors… The Pyramid by Henning…
Van Veeteren is among the most famous of Swedish fictional detectives, but this was my first written encounter with the character. This book started off brilliantly with a mystifying mystery of the locked room tradition: a drowned wife in a locked bathroom, the husband so inebriated he could only remember their wild festivity of the…
Comparisons to Jo Nesbo and Steig Larsson are somewhat unhelpful here: this isn’t a speed-reading spoon-fed page-turner to be read in a frenzy of tension. It has more in common with the works of writers like Leif Persson, Karin Fossum, Henning Mankell and Gunnar Staalesen. There is almost as much to be gleaned in the…
Our latest list of cracking crime fiction includes Nordic noir, international espionage and adventure, English investigators, wartime military mysteries, Scandi crime, literary fiction and historical intrigue: the weird, the witty and the gritty; thrillers, killers and all-action assassins from world-class writers and indie authors. Get ready to load your Kindle… ROAD TO ITHACA by Ben…
This final set of three 90 minutes films are the hardest of the English-language interpretation to appreciate. Kurt Wallander has been brought to the screen by three different actors. If you prefer either of the Scandinavian versions to Kenneth Branagh’s portrayal of the Swedish detective then you definitely won’t enjoy this one. If, however, you’re a fan…
Both the English title and the suggestion that this book is noir (Nordic or otherwise) are pretty misleading. This is character-driven police procedural set in small-town Norway, along the lines of Wallander or Beck. It places realistic human characters at the core of a criminal investigation; the discovery of a dead body juxtaposed alongside everyday…
The final episodes of this Swedish interpretation of Wallander more than live up to the high standards of the earlier series. Given the lead character’s situation – his gradual acceptance of intellectual decline and the onset of dementia – they have the potential to be mawkish, morbid or just plain miserable. But instead each 90-minute…
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