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Andrea Camilleri’s 28th and final murder mystery in the Inspector Montalbano series, Riccardino is a befitting ending to this extremely popular crime series with over 65 million copies sold across the world. Adapted for Italian TV and screened on BBC 4, the series has been translated into 32 languages. Camilleri started writing the series in 1994 when he was about 70 years old and wrote the final book in 2004, deposited it with his publisher on the condition that it be published only after his death. Surprised to find himself alive at 91 in November 2016, he revisited the story and found it ‘good and unfortunately still relevant’…

Quiet in Her Bones is a thriller by Nalini Singh, set in Auckland, New Zealand, depicting an immaculate and unapologetic insider’s view to the culture and class of New Zealand’s rich and powerful through the incident of a disappearance of a woman from an exclusive cul-de-sac. Using this incident, Nalini Singh carves out an entire world that a missing person can leave behind or open up after their disappearance. The story begins with a turn of events when Nina Rai, wife to a very powerful Ishaan Rai and mother to Aarav Rai, re-appears many years after she went missing, in her decomposed and skeletal self. Although long gone, Nina was never presumed to be dead, most of all, by her husband and son…

It has been a rather grotesque and gory affair—my tryst with Scandinavian or Nordic noir literary fiction—crime novels to be precise. And a long and protracted one, often bordering on an obsessive involvement with the genre many may term bloody, obsequious, and fundamentally predicated on titillation and an appeal to baser human instincts. I often tend to agree. With narratives featuring psycho-pathological serial murderers and twisted child abusers plying their trade against the intensely bleak and forlorn Scandinavian landscape, the plotlines might be enough to put one off the genre for all times to come. But one tends to endure and come to terms with the darkness of the backdrop and of the characters themselves and view it as integral to the overarching appeal of the Nordic noir genre…

All sorts of people write mystery stories in which a crime has to be solved. Most are solved by policemen, but many are solved by gifted amateurs. For example, there are medical murders. There are drug related murders. There’s murder in the financial world. There are many other types of murders involving rage, jealousy, conspiracy and what have you. Usually, policemen and professional detectives solve them. Sometimes old ladies solve them. So why not economists, too? After all, they have been around for about 300 years and have multiplied like rabbits in the last 50 and at last count there were around 100,000 of them, male and female. But only two, writing under one name, have taken the reputational risk of writing murder mysteries. Economists can be very dull and unforgiving in that respect…

In his excellent biography, Robert Gerwarth recounts how Reinhard Heydrich secured the job of creating the fearsome security apparatus, the SD, which eventually developed and implemented the Final Solution.‘…he began to develop an insatiable appetite for crime fiction and spy novels, many of them serialized in newspapers. Detective novels from Britain and the United States—from Sherlock Holmes to Nick Carter and Nat Pinkerton—were a huge success in Germany and they captured the imagination of the young Heydrich. Throughout the war and the 1920s, he maintained his keen interest in the genre and put his expertise to good use when he first met Himmler in 1931…