On the Radar — Yes it’s all about setting this week as Cardiff detective Fiona Griffiths ventures into the countryside to investigate a body found in an ancient church and there’s soon a monk-tastic mystery unfolding. We’ve also got three wonderful translations for you – from Poland, Iceland and Italy – and two contemporary crime novels from two very different British authors. Read on to enjoy this week’s new releases as we head off to Wales for our first book…
Wow. It’s hard to believe that Harry Bingham is on his fifth Fiona Griffiths novel, and by all accounts the previous ones have been stunning. In The Dead House, our Welsh heroine is operating beyond her normal environs of Cardiff and finds herself in those famous green valleys. The body of a young woman has been found in an old ‘dead house’ – the medieval annexe of a church where once bodies were kept for burial. The girl has been carefully laid there, which intrigues Griffiths, who soon finds herself investigating a remote and secret monastery. Out 28 July – watch for our review.
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Washed up writer Paul Morris thinks things could be going his way when Alice, an old acquaintance, invites him to join her family at their holiday home in Greece. He feels a sense of importance he’s not had for years, but not everyone staying there is happy to have Paul around and things are stirred up even more when there’s a sighting of a woman who went missing on the island a decade ago. She was just 13 at the time. The unsettling feeling surrounding the holiday gets worse when somebody is attacked. Is Paul’s holiday about to get sticky under the hot Greek sun?
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The Polish author Zygmunt Miloszewski has seen his crime stories gaining traction around the world, and this is the third to be translated into English. It features his anti-hero character Prosecutor Szacki, who’s called out when a skeleton is discovered in a World War II bunker in the beautiful city of Olsztyn. A little forensic work reveals that the flesh was chemically removed from the bones – this is no relic of the Nazi occupation. After identifying the corpse, he questions the wife, and realises things aren’t quite right. Then a man is found maimed – a man with a history of domestic violence. This, it turns out, is Miloszewski’s main them in what was a bestseller in Poland last year. Out 1 August.
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Even during the months of the midnight sun, nature conspires to bring darkness to the island nation of Iceland and Ragnar Jonasson’s police detective Ari Thor Arason. As this story unfolds, a volcanic eruption blots out the 24-hour sunlight and in this oppressive atmosphere Ari Thor struggles to solve the murder of a man found beaten to death near an idyllic fjord. Meanwhile, a young reporter is carrying out her own investigation, unaware that someone’s life is in the balance and that there could be a killer on the loose. This story follows on from Ragnar Jonasson’s earlier novel Snowblind. Out now for Kindle and on 15 August as a paperback.
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The Italian author Umberto Eco blew the doors off historical crime fiction with his debut novel – Il noma della rosa – back in 1980, and subsequently wrote literary fiction and philosophy. Numero Zero, was published in English just months before the author’s death earlier this year, and tells the story of a journalist called Colonna who is rather taken with the conspiracy theories of a man called Braggadocio. Chiefly, he believes that the Mussolini strung up at a Milan petrol station at the end of World War II was a body double and the real Il Duce escaped. When a body is found, and then Colonna’s newspaper is closed, links to the conspiracy seem to appear… The paperback is out 21 July.
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Peter Lovesey is one of the old statesmen of British crime fiction, and has chaired the Crime Writers’ Association as well as winning its Gold and Diamond Dagger awards. Diamond is also the name of Lovesey’s chief detective character – Peter Diamond – whose beat is the Georgian city of Bath in the West Country. In his 16th outing, Diamond arrives at a traffic accident involving a police car one night, and finds himself performing CPR on a man who was thrown onto an embankment. It turns out to be local eccentric Igor Pellegrini who was out on his tricycle with an urn containing human ashes. When Diamond searches the man’s workshop he finds something even more disturbing. Released 21 July.
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