This summer’s weather has certainly made it harder to wander from home, and our bank accounts are lower than expected so international travel this summer may be a luxury few of us can truly afford. Instead, venture mentally from your porch swing or comfortable sofa into some fictional depictions of some real places for crime and detection.
In A Carrion Death by Michael Stanley, enjoy the exotic beauty of Botswana as Detective Kubu unravels a mystifying murder and uncovers a very tangled web of conspiracy. Kubu is called out to a remote tourist camp in Botswana when the manager finds a hyena chewing on human remains. What first seems to be a simple case of death by desert turns into something much more complex.

Despite a shared setting with Alexander McCall Smith’s “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” series, this novel contains grittier details and the fast-paced forensic thriller may resonate more with fans of Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta. The audio version which is downloadable from “Overdrive” is exquisite and expertly narrated by Simon Prebble. If you are a reader who enjoys crime novels with African settings, also try Richard Kunzmann and Deon Meyer.

If France is a place you daydream of visiting, then try Pierre Magnan’s Death in the Truffle Wood. Octogenarian Magnan is a gifted storyteller whose style contains surreal, dark, oddball humor, as well as smatterings of Agatha Christie’s old-fashioned gentility and Peter Mayle’s French pastoral narratives. Banon is a remote, highly superstitious Provençal village where not much happens beyond growing truffles, eating spectacular food, and enjoying illicit affairs. When a group of hippies disappears, and bodies start turning up in bizarre circumstances (drained of blood and laid in a tomb), Commissionaire Laviolette, an old-fashioned investigator out of the Maigret school, is called in to investigate.

This is a delightful and unusual novel that will please both mystery readers and Provence lovers. The author treats village politics as well as the quarrels and liaisons of his marvelous characters with sly wit and compassion. Beautifully translated, this is the first in a series. Magnan has been a favorite author in France for many years.

Ever imagine a sojourn to Capri, Italy? In Carol Goodman’s The Night Villa, University of Texas classics professor Sophie Chase, after barely surviving a gunman with ties to a sinister cult, joins an expedition to Capri. Sophie’s hopes for a recuperative idyll fade after her old boyfriend, who disappeared years before into the same cult as the campus gunman, appears in the area, implicating the cult in a criminal conspiracy.

Readers who like mysteries and want more Italy from a variety of locations will benefit from picking up David Hewson’s Nic Costa’s series set in Rome and other cities (A Season for the Dead), Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti mysteries set in Venice (Death at La Fenice), and Grace Brophy’s Commissario Cenni series set in Umbria (The Last Enemy). All will transport you to some magical Italian cities and countryside.

In S.J. Bolton’s promising debut, Sacrifice, Tora Hamilton is an outsider at her new home on the rocky, wind-swept Shetland Islands, a hundred miles from the northeastern tip of Scotland. Digging in the peat on their new property, Tora unearths a human body, at first glance a centuries-old bog body, interesting but not uncommon. But realizing that the body is in fact much newer, that the woman’s heart has been cut out and that she was killed within a few days of bearing a child, Tora, herself an obstetrician, becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to her–even when the police, her colleagues and, eventually her husband, warn her against getting involved.

Want to visit another Scottish island? In Simon Beckett’s Written in Bone, David Hunter returns back to his roots as a forensic anthropologist (The Chemistry of Death), when he is called in to examine a badly burned body found in a deserted hut on a small island in the Hebrides.

If bogs and forensic mysteries compel you, than also investigate Erin Hart’s Haunted Ground, set in Ireland. The Irish landscape holds past and present secrets as archaeologist Cormac O’Callaghan and pathologist Nora Gavin encounter a mystery when a decapitated woman is found in the bogs who may be related to a recent mother/child disappearance.

Categories: Book Buzz,Library News
Tags: armchair, book, books, fiction, novel, novels, readers, reading, reder, summer