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Another great Scottish mystery writer—I don’t know how I could have overlooked MacBride for so long. He has an ongoing series featuring Detective Sergeant Logan McRae and a memorable cast of fellow officers working in the city of Aberdeen, also known as the Granite City. This is a dark series with frustrated police trying to solve horrific crimes while still pursuing their own lives and loves in occasional snatches of free time. 
McRae is an honorable but stubborn man whose experiences have left him sleeping badly, drinking excessively, and working obsessively. In Blind Eye, he is hunting for a man who is blinding a series of victims by gouging out their eyeballs. The crimes seem to be motivated by hatred of the growing population of Polish immigrants in Aberdeen, but each lead fails, while police and civilians are increasingly agitated by the horror of each new crime.
Once again, this is fairly violent, dark stuff. (It seems as though a good many American and European mysteries being written now are preoccupied with the underside of the human psyche–perhaps not a surprise to anyone reading the newspaper headlines day in day out.) However, the violence is the object of McRae’s concern, not something glorified, even covertly. And McRae is a character of considerable substance and interest. MacBride is a writer worth your time and attention.
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intriguing. Like many of his Scandinavian counterparts (such as Martin Beck, created by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, and Kurt Wallander, created by Henning Mankell), Espinosa seems to be mildly depressed most of the time, perhaps because of the pathetic diet of frozen pasta dinners he habitually consumes in the disarray of an apartment he never brings himself to put in order. Darkly comic, worldly wise, these mysteries have memorable moments of human connection and serenity. Their pace is quite deliberate, and Espinosa sometimes seems to turn over every rock on the shore, but they are well realized and engaging. Any of these will be a welcome escape from the January blizzards some of us endure.
become private enterprises funded by corporations to protect their interests. Prison, “Painball,” is a kind of Roman circus of criminals hunting one another and televised for the enlightenment of the citizenry. Two women, Ren and Toby, who have been rescued from violent sexual predators by the Gardeners, are the central characters. Their efforts to survive after The Flood, a pandemic that kills most of the human population, are painful. Despite the dark themes of the novel, there is also great hope for the kindest and most generative aspects of humankind, and there is a dark humor throughout the novel.
browse, I find that many of them are just not so great. The Girl Who Played with Fire is as riveting as the first entry, with more of the back story on Lisbeth Salander, the fascinating protagonist of the series, who lives by her own moral code, snooping at will through computers and standing off against some truly scary villains. Her history is compelling, and gives us sympathy with her even as she sometimes seems to care little for other people. Her utter refusal to give in or lose is really fun to see played out. Larsson brings in the world of journalism with the character of Mikael Bloomqvist, the clever investigative reporter who happened into partnership with Salander in the first novel, and who spends most of this one chasing her shadow. The final installment, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, is due out in May of 2010. I will be in a quandary—once I read it, the series is over for me. (If you missed the story, Stieg Larsson, a Swedish journalist, submitted the manuscripts for the three novels, but died before the first was published.) If you like edgy, fast-paced thrillers with a lot of style and you haven’t read this series, you have some fun in store.