A married couple die in a bizarre murder in an archaic Venetian glass foundry. Three exiled Roman cops are asked to in­ves­ti­gate by the Venice au­thor­i­ties but are given to understand that their work should be pro forma. Of course, they don't listen and find far more than was wanted.

The cops and their visiting girl­friends are in­ter­est­ing characters. Their stubborn insistence on digging for the truth has real con­se­quences for their own lives, and the case scars most of them. Venice itself is also a character, …continue.

Kate Brannigan normally in­ves­ti­gates white-collar crimes, but re­luc­tant­ly agrees to find popstar Jett's lost muse, Moira. When Moira is murdered at Jett's mansion six weeks after Kate finds her, Jett engages her again to discover which of his entourage did it.

Kate is engaging and cheeky and it's fun to ride along with her.

A faceless corpse has been found in a remote valley in the Yorkshire Dales. Is it connected to another murder there, five years earlier? Chief Inspector Alan Banks in­ves­ti­gates in the village of Swaineshead, which leads him to Toronto to dig into the dead man's background.

Competent, thoughtful police procedural told from the viewpoints of Banks and Katie Greenock, the doormat wife of one of the villagers.

Nathan Oliver is a great writer, but a horrible man. Adam Dalgleish of Scotland Yard is called in when Oliver is found murdered on an island that is ex­clu­sive­ly reserved for VIPs. Only a handful of people could possibly be the killer.

P.D. James adds psy­cho­log­i­cal insight to a tightly plotted classic mystery. Dalgleish is both a poet and a detective. Both aspects are required to get to the heart of what happened on Combe Island.

Jack Irish is a one-time lawyer who makes a living doing odd job­s—in­ves­ti­ga­tions, racehorse hand­i­cap­ping, cabinet making—in Melbourne. A former client, who went to jail years ago while Jack had crawled into a bottle, tries to reach Jack and promptly turns up dead. Jack starts looking and what he finds isn't pretty: corruption all the way up into the state government.

Jack isn't stupid, but he is naïve and out of his depth for much of the book. Temple combines the Australian backdrop, social commentary, a decent plot, and …continue.

Kevin Kerney, deputy chief of the New Mexico State Police, has just inherited a high-country ranch, where he finds a dis­mem­bered skeleton.

An old-school police procedural (by a real cop) with believable characters and a not im­plau­si­ble plot. The prose is a little clumsy, but the story pulled me along.

Inspector Henri Castang of the Police Judiciare in­ves­ti­gates the apparent kidnapping of a politi­cian's mistress and discovers a far-right conspiracy.

Written in Freeling's char­ac­ter­is­tic idio­syn­crat­ic style, this is as much a meditation on corruption and compromise as it is a police procedural.

After crusading financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist is convicted of libel, he re­luc­tant­ly agrees to in­ves­ti­gate the 40-year-old dis­ap­pear­ance of the teenaged Harriet Vanger for her great-uncle Henrik, a rich in­dus­tri­al­ist. He is aided by the antisocial hacker Lisabeth Salander, the eponymous tattooed girl.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was published shortly before Larsson's untimely death, and later became an in­ter­na­tion­al bestseller. It's a classic locked-room mys­tery—Har­ri­et dis­ap­peared from a sealed-off island full of the extended, ugly Vanger clan. It's an indictment of the Nazism buried …continue.

Out of his mind with grief after the senseless murder of his wife Helen in What Came Before He Shot Her, Detective Su­per­in­ten­dent Tommy Lynley has been walking along the Cornish coastline for weeks when he stumbles across a dead body. Re­luc­tant­ly, he becomes part of the police in­ves­ti­ga­tion. Half the village seems to have a motive for killing the victim. Old slights and recent fights have festered, pitting family members against each other.

Elizabeth George is noted for the depth of her char­ac­ter­i­za­tion. Even the supporting characters are well-drawn, complex …continue.

George Smiley has retired after the events of Call for the Dead. He is asked to look into the murder of the wife of a teacher at the exclusive Carne public school, as he can mix socially with the staff while the police cannot. She had sent a letter predicting that her husband would murder her. The couple were from a lower-class, Non­con­formist background. He had tried to assimilate, she had not, and it had rankled the snobs.

Smiley finds class prejudice and moral ambiguity as he …continue.