Among the merits of crime fiction is that of rooting a landscape in the imagination, and making people travel, which adds charm to the plots thanks to the visual perception of places. And we travel, with the foreign mysteries proposed here, from Yokomizo Seishi’s Japan to Ben Pastor’s Odessa, from Louise Penny’s Canada to Alan Bradley’s England, from Jane Harper’s Australia to Pablo Maurette’s Buenos Aires, from Martin Suter’s Zurich to Pierre Martin’s Provence and Côte d’Azur, from Jo Nesbø’s Minneapolis to Amanda Cross’s Massachusetts.
Yokomizo Seishi was a master of enigmatic detective stories in which, according to Japanese tradition, many forces are at work against the background of a calligraphic nature. It is 1955 and the rest in a spa village of the scruffy but infallible detective Kindaichi Kosuke in Detective Kindaichi and the demonic nursery rhyme (Sellerio, translated by Francesco Vitucci) is disturbed by some murders and disturbing presences, which push him to deal with a murder that happened twenty years earlier.
Thirteenth of Ben Pastor’s novels in the series featuring Martin von Bora, a Wehrmacht officer, The Pilgrim’s Mirror (Sellerio, trans. Luigi Sanvito) takes us to 1941 in a cosmopolitan Odessa, the scene of the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the operations of the death squads. Major Alt is killed during his research on the mass graves of a massacre and von Bora, a sensitive intellectual who hates the horrors of Nazism, investigates.
In the woods of Canada, in Quebec, Louise Penny sets Revelation. The investigations of Commissioner Armand Gamache (Einaudi, trans. Alessandra Montrucchio and Carla Palmieri) with the methodical commissioner distracted from the daily rituals of the village of Three Pines to investigate a corpse without identity inside a bistro, a murder apparently without motive and which puts Gamache face to face with unacknowledged secrets and brutal truths.
Flavia de Luce and the crime in the cucumber field (Sellerio, trans. Stefania Bertola) is the first novel by Alan Bradley, who recently passed away, in the series with the eleven-year-old Englishman Flavia, who in the summer of 1950 solves cases with the help of chemistry practiced in the Victorian castle of Buckshaw, in the imaginary English village of Bishop’s Lacey, where she lives with her two sisters and her father. Between humor and comic-grotesque situations, Flavia is set in motion when she comes across the corpse of a man in the cucumber field at the back of the castle.
The atmospheres created by Jane Harper in the novels set in the outback or in the Australian countryside, between farms, pastures and large deserted spaces, unfulfilled lives and restless dreams, are always fascinating. In Nobody is forever (Bompiani, trans. Tommaso Varvello) Carralon is a desolate place due to a polluting mine. Sam had returned there after five years for his birthday and for research on the impact of the mine on the environment. But that same evening Sam disappears and his family is left devastated. An absence that the mother never accepted, and for this reason she continues to dig into the lives and secrets of neighbors and friends.
We move to a sad and decadent Buenos Aires with Pablo Maurette who signs La Niña de Oro (Sellerio, trans. Gina Maneri), starring the deputy prosecutor Silvia Rey who enters the tentacles of the city where nothing is as it seems. Starting from the club La Niña de Oro, frequented by Rey, and whose name alludes to other opaque realities. Like the crime of professor Aníbal Doliner, a teratology scholar, found dead in his home. Her research on albinism leads Rey into the environments of male prostitution, among false leads, magical charlatanism to cover up crimes and lazy prosecution of justice.
Two lovers of beauty and art, Friedrich von Allmen and Adrian Weynfeldt, are the protagonists of Allmen and Mr. Weynfeldt (Sellerio, trans. Alice Gardoncini) by Martin Suter. Characters who find themselves together in the muffled atmosphere of Zurich among manor houses, auction houses and elegant venues. The refined but penniless Allmen, “art detective”, and Weynfeldt, collector and auction house expert, both disenchanted in the face of fakes and counterfeits, investigate, between reflections on works of art and design, the disappearance of a small Picasso owned by Weynfeldt, which becomes complicated when a corpse turns up.
We go around the beauties of Provence and the French Riviera with Pierre Martin and his Monsieur Le Comte and the art of killing (Neri Pozza, trans. Roberta Scaravelli), the first chapter of the series with Lucien de Chacarasse, a hitman against his will when, from the idyll of his little restaurant in Villefranche-sur-Mer, between bouillabasse and excellent wines, he is called back by his father on the point of death to put into practice, as the his ancestors, “the art of killing” on commission and for a fee.
Leaving the frozen atmospheres of the Norwegian landscape, The Wolf’s Footprint by Jo Nesbø (Einaudi, trans. Eva Kampmann) is her first book set in the USA, in Minneapolis, where the murder of an arms dealer in 2016 makes Tomas Gomez, a “quiet” neighbor of hers, suspect that he could be the ferocious Lobo, a killer in the Nineties. Detective Bob Oz investigates, amidst twists and disturbing details, a life full of alcohol, women and painful ghosts of the past.
It is a tribute to the literature A Crime for James Joyce (Sellerio, trans. Giulia Niccolai) by Amanda Cross, promoter of American feminism of the 1960s. And after the first of the mysteries that revolved around Freud, in this one the literature professor Kate Fansler, who finds herself in the countryside of Massachusetts in the house of the late publisher whose archive she has to take care of, including a correspondence with Joyce, makes her become a detective when the murder of a local peasant girl occurs.