Seasonal Reading

This past Sunday, my husband and I were looking forward to watching the Inspector Lynley Mysteries on PBS, but they were not carried on our local station. My husband surmised that it was because they were reruns of the season last year--just two episodes from last year to set the viewers up for the new season. It is a good strategy on the station's part, but not for us, because we did not watch it last year. And, the reason, we did not watch it last year is that they were shown early in the summer.

The Inspector Lynley Mysteries are not summer watching--they are complicated mysteries, with dark crimes and struggling characters. And the landscape they depict is a rainly, dark one not a land filled with sunlight and warmth. In other words, they are perfect for that end of summer season when you are moving on to the fall and its cooler weather and increasingly shorter days.

I change my reading during the seasons--in the summer you may want something lighter or a book that is set in a warmer climate, in the fall I want to enjoy the season so I pick books that complement the weather. Scandinavian mysteries are particularly good for the fall and the winter. There is such a strong sense of place and nature in these books. I was struck when I read my very first Henning Mankell book how much the landscape adds to characterizations and the atmosphere. That book was set during the Midsummer festival and it seemed so fascinating to be celebrating a holiday because of the placement of the sun, coming from a country where all of our holidays seem to relate to our history or religious festivals. There is simply a sense of differentness in celebrating the arrival of the longest day of the year, that sense of being let into a strange and different world hooked me right into Mankell's writing. This is a great contributor to why I love international mysteries.

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino

Grotesque is Natsuo Kirino's second book to be translated and published in English after Out. This is a very dark book made more so by the narrator's dispassionate delivery. The narrator is unnamed, the daughter of a Japanese mother and a Swiss father who is always aware of her differentness. And, differentness is often not good in this society (or any society). The narrator has a sister who is described having beauty that is nearly perfect and this marks her as different also.

The narrator is accepted into one of the best schools for women and Tokyo and hopes that her placement at this school will enable her to be accepted in a good college. She sees her acceptance to this school as a fresh start, but once she begins school she observes a rigid hierarchy--marked by time in the school (the school has a grammar school-like version) and students who have been in the school from the beginning are the leadership group. Beauty and great accomplishment can also help you attain status in the school and the narrator has neither, so she remains different and outside and becomes increasingly bitter.

Kirino sets the book around the murders of two prostitutes: one is a former classmate of the narrator and the other is in fact, her very beautiful sister. The story is told from the perspectives of each of the characters and even the murderer, a Chinese immigrant gets his turn to describe his background, how he came to Japan and why he killed one of the women.

This is a somewhat bleak book but the narrator draws you in with her increasingly erratic commentary and the story is fleshed out as you read the narrator's version and later read about the same event from the perspectives of her friend and sister.

The Glass Devil by Helene Tursten

The Glass Devil is the latest book by the Swedish author Helene Tursten. Her books take place in Gothenberg on the southwestern part of Sweden. A gruesome triple murder is discovered and Irene Huss and her colleagues begin the investigation. The victims are members of a religious family; the husband, wife and oldest son are killed. The surroundings of the victims show signs of possible Satanic rituals and the detectives begin to learn as much about that as they can. However, that turns out to be a misdirection. Huss goes to England to meet with the only surviving member of the family, a daughter who is a computer professional. The daughter is distraut and Irene and her colleagues assume that it is because of the murder.

Huss is an interesting character, for all of the mayhem and horror of the murders, she has a happy home life with her husband and two daughters. The juxtaposition between the murdered family and Huss is clear and her character shares little of the angst that seems to suffuse the lives of many of the male detectives in crime fiction. All is revealed at the end although it seems like Tursten skipped a step or two to get there. Altogether another satisfying entry in the Inspector Irene Huss series.