Review by New York Times Review
"GOD, I WAS AWFUL at choosing friends." You said it, Anna. Or Sophie. Or whatever your name is. The fiery heroine of Denise Mina's endlessly surprising new mystery, CONVICTION (Mulholland, $27), has left her home and family in Glasgow and is on the run, trying to outrace the secrets that keep bubbling up from her past. Some things we know for sure: Anna McDonald, as she's calling herself these days, has adopted the identity of an ordinary housewife living a routine existence in a nondescript suburb. But when her husband discards her for her best friend, she tells the children goodbye and bolts, ignoring her own troubles to clear the name of an old friend. Leon Parker is dead, but when she met him, he was a guest at a castle in the Highlands where she was passing herself off as a chambermaid. Leon has been vilified for supposedly killing himself and his children on the Dana, a yacht that sank with their bodies inside. At least, that's the story told on a true-crime podcast series called "Death and the Dana" that makes Anna positively livid. The damage done on social networks in the name of truth and transparency is a major theme in this incredible novel, which seems to have been written in a whitehot rage. Mina also takes on big issues like gang rapes by sports teams ("They said I did it myself, for attention and sympathy," says one battered victim), the toll that hard drugs take on nice people like Adam Ross ("the sickest alive person I'd ever seen") and the received wisdom of certain males about certain women ("The eternal companions of all clever women are mistrust and scorn"). And at the center of it all is Anna, not quite a free spirit - not in a world that doesn't respect freedom or honor spirit - but more like an indomitable life force committed to saving the damned, even when she's unable to do more than fix a few things as best she can. Mina has always written with a head full of ideas and a mouth full of tough talk. Here, she's finally got a story big enough to hold it all together. at age 70, the protagonist of Susan Richards Shreve's sweetly melancholy new novel, more news TOMORROW (Norton, $25.95), Still feels like an orphan. Georgianna Grove was 4 years old when her father went to prison for strangling her mother, and although she never believed in his guilt, she also never felt compelled to seek out the true killer - until now. Gathering up her family, she steers them on a canoe trip up the Bone River to Missing Lake, Wis., where the 1941 murder was done. No one can deny Georgie, who collects lost souls at a boardinghouse she calls the Home for the Incurables. But as someone smartly observes, "You have to admit this is a very strange trip." Actually, the expedition is more like some mythic journey of selfdiscovery, held aloft by Shreve's silken prose. Sharing the narrative are two principal storytellers: Georgie herself, who is finally ready to face the family heritage, and her 13-year-old grandson, Thomas, who is beginning to understand the value his grandmother places on each trip she takes, "believing that I will find something but knowing that I may not." THERE ARE CERTAIN THINGS that Scandinavian writers do very, very well, like describing harsh weather and desolate places. In THE ISLAND (Minotaur, $27.99), Ragnar Jonasson presents Iceland's gloomy West Fjords peninsula as a "treeless landscape stretching out bleak and ominously empty in the gathering dusk," in Victoria Cribb's translation. Nevertheless, love-smitten Benedikt accompanies his new girlfriend there in the autumn of 1987 to swim in a natural hot springs pool and to canoodle in the hut her family owns. The swim goes well, the canoodling not so much, because after his girl tells Benedikt about the ghost that haunts the valley, this idyll takes a bad turn. Ten years on, Benedikt is still staggering under "the strain of keeping up the deception, of carrying the weight of this unbearable secret." Then Inspector Hulda Hermannsdottir, the detective in this flinty series, begins looking into the old case because it seems relevant to a current investigation. Consider this one of the author's best plots, layered with that dour Scandinavian atmosphere we love. who conned me into reading Deborah Goodrich Royce's finding mrs. ford (Post hím, $27), anyway? Oh, right - I chose this first novel myself. Something about the flashbacks - from staid, starchy Watch Hill, R.I., in 2014 to big, bad Detroit in 1979 - made it feel sexy and a little dangerous. That's the feeling that thrills goody-good-girl Susan Bentley when she meets wild-child Annie Nelson and "dazzling" Sammy Fakhouri on her summer job as a cocktail waitress at a mobrun disco. The position turns out to be more exciting than Susan bargained for, and at the end of the summer, someone is dead and someone else wishes she'd decided to work at a less exciting place, like the Dairy Queen. And now, all these years later, posh Susan finds the F.B.I. on her doorstep. The prosaic level of the writing doesn't improve, but the story is a fun one, with a nifty twist midway. It's also a resounding object lesson on why cocktail waitressing at a mob joint does not necessarily make a great summer job. Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Ten years ago, Katla's body was found at her family's Westfjords vacation house, and her father was arrested for her murder. Now, on the tenth anniversary of the crime, Katla's brother, Dagur, and their childhood friends Klara, Alexandra, and Benedikt have reunited for a weekend on a scenic but isolated island. Despite the idyllic location, painful reminders of Katla's death overshadow their gathering, and they are grateful to depart. On the morning of their departure, however, Klara goes missing, and their frantic search reveals her body beneath a cliff. Reykjavik CID Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir (introduced in The Darkness, 2018) is immediately suspicious that Klara's death wasn't an accident. Hulda is certain that the four friends are lying to her about why they've reunited, and Klala's autopsy reveals she was strangled. It's short work for Hulda to uncover the connection to Katla's murder and to find disturbing inconsistencies in her colleagues' case against her father. Another suspense-laden Icelandic gem: Jónasson's confidential, intimate prose evokes both Iceland's harsh, beautiful solitude and the deep connections Icelanders forge.--Christine Tran Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Jónasson's masterly sequel to 2018's The Darkness opens with a cryptic prologue set in a town just south of Reykjavík in 1988. A seven-year-old girl puzzles her parents after they return home one night by saying that both of her babysitters were kind, though only one babysitter had been with her. Flash back to a year earlier, when an unnamed 20-year-old woman takes her boyfriend, Benedikt, to her family's summer home on the island of Ellidaey down the coast from Reykjavík, where she tells him stories about Iceland's history of witch-burning in the 17th century. That outing ends in murder, and corruption mars the subsequent police inquiry. A decade later, Insp. Hulda Hermannsdóttir, who was passed over for promotion at the time of that flawed investigation, takes charge when another dead body turns up on Ellidaey with a connection to the previous murder. The link between the babysitter's mysterious companion and the murders gradually becomes clear as the plot builds to a shiver-inducing conclusion. Jónasson delivers a mind-bending look into human darkness that earns its twists. Agent: David Headley, DHH Literary (U.K.). (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A prequel to The Darkness (2018) that picks up Inspector Hulda Hermansdttir in 1997, 15 years before her unplanned retirement, and finds her already just as lonely, resentful, and driven to succeed against all odds.Ten years after the death of Katla, a young woman who was murdered on Ellidaey Island, an uninhabited scrap of rock off the remote southwest coast of Iceland, four friends of hers return to the island. It's not entirely clear why securities trader Dagur, farmer's daughter Alexandra, or perennially unemployed Klara, who mostly aren't close to each other, have accepted the invitation of software company founder Benedikt to the scene of Katla's murder. But it's soon very clear that the reunion was a seriously bad idea. When one of the four not-quite-friends ends up at the bottom of a cliff, the others make appropriately mournful sounds. But the discovery of marks on the victim's throat indicates that this new death is another murder and raises the uncomfortable question of which of the three survivorsthere's literally no one else on the islandis the killer. Hulda, who's been off in America seeking her birth father from among a short list of GIs named Robert who could possibly have impregnated her mother during a tour of duty in Reykjavik, returns in time to grab the case from under the nose of Ldur, the former professional rival who's now her boss after having risen swiftly through the ranks, his rise propelled in no small part by his work 10 years ago in identifying Katla's killer, who suddenly doesn't look so guilty after all.Jnasson, who could give lessons on how to sustain a chilly atmosphere, sprinkles just enough hints of ghostly agents to make you wonder if he's going to fall back on a paranormal resolution to the mystery. Don't worry: The solution is both uncanny and all-too-human. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
