Crossing the Line by Frédérique Molay
Translated by Anne Trager — If your tastes tend towards the gory and you enjoy your crime set in a foreign clime, then this could be the book for you. Molay is the holder of a slew of international crime fiction awards and has been…
A Man's Head by Georges Simenon
Translated by David Coward — Having accrued an incomplete collection of dog-eared, yellowed and slightly foxed editions of Simenon’s Maigret novels by scavenging second hand bookshops, Penguin’s project to reprint all 75 of them was music to my ears. This set is being translated afresh…
Dog Will Have His Day
The Three Evangelists appeared in English in 2006, and this is the long awaited sequel by Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau, AKA Fred Vargas. The story opens with the bizarre discovery of a human toe bone in a random dog turd. Louis Kehlweiler is the sharp-eyed observer. He…
The Lying-Down Room
“I love Paris in the summer when it sizzles”, goes the old song. Certainly, the August heat is a trial for Chief Inspector Serge Morel as he tries to solve a puzzling and brutal series of murders. Not only is Morel finding the temperature a…
Midnight in Europe by Alan Furst
World War II is yet to start, but fascist forces in Germany and Italy are making ominous declarations, and General Franco’s nationalist army is fighting a civil war with the Spanish Republic. The Republic maintains fragile control over Madrid and Barcelona, but they are starved…
Under the Channel by Gilles Pétel
Translated by Emily Boyce and Jane Aitken — A dead body on a train is a mystery straight out of Agatha Christie and the Golden Age of crime fiction. When the murder was committed on the train’s journey through the Channel Tunnel, though, which country’s…
The Lying-Down Room by Anna Jaquiery
The Lying Down Room introduces us to the charismatic and dedicated Chief Inspector Serge Morel. The story opens in Paris in the stifling August heat, and Morel is called to examine a disturbing crime scene. An elderly woman has been brutally murdered to the soundtrack…