Quote:
Originally Posted by Nyssa
My husband really enjoys the Laundry Files series as well! He's recommended it to me at least 3 times. It's now on the top of my TBR for my 2015 series challenge.
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It's a very entertaining series, as long as one finds the premise and execution in line with their tastes to begin with (may not be suitable for some of the more sensitive Gentle Readers in the audience, reader discretion is advised, yada yada yada…).
If you'd like to get an early seasonal head start on it next year, you can read the Hugo-nominated festive Laundry office Xmas party novella:
Overtime free online at Tor.com. It's also been a freebie in several of the stores a couple of years ago, is perfectly readable standalone, and contains no spoilers for the main series (just a few veiled mentions of stuff you won't pick up on until you've read the actual novels, but nothing that will either make you wonder "
are they talking about?!", or "
I didn't want to know so much so soon!"). Actually, this was my intro to the series, and it was after reading and enjoying it that I decided I had to see what the rest of it was like.
So, finished a couple more of my AmazonCrossing-exclusive translated Nordic crime thriller novel purchases.
The Seventh Child by Danish journalist-turned-author
Erik Valeur has apparently been translated into some 20 languages and gotten some kind of award wins.
This is actually much more of a psychological drama novel, though there was plenty of murder, mystery, and outright crime involved.
The setup for this is a prominent orphanage that once upon a time handled many secretive adoptions from quote-unquote "unwed mothers" back when that was a major stigma even for Danish society, and seems to have been the site of a potential major political scandal involving its possible use as a laundering facility for re-homing unwanted and potentially embarrassing children of prominent Danish public figures by young women they were having affairs with, with the ensuing threat of a journalistic exposé for one particular orphan's highly-placed parentage, if only they could find proof of it…
At the centre of this possibility are seven former orphans whose pasts have been thoroughly scrubbed, but who once occupied the same room in the orphanage at the same time, and thus have a pseudo-mystical connection, which is exploited by the sending of the exact same anonymous note to each of them.
This was a surprisingly long novel (11,000+ locations, which Amazon says equals 642 pages, at the $2 I paid for this on sale, I certainly got value-for-money in terms of word count) which circled around the central mystery of What The Hell Is Going On, Exactly?!, slowly drawing out the personalities and life circumstances of the seven former orphans by way of explaining how they got so messed up that any one of them could probably have been committing threats and murder, while at the same time using the partial-viewpoint character of one of the orphans to try and probe the current-day mystery/scandal which is rapidly getting out of control of the person who apparently instigated it.
In between, there's rather a lot of deconstruction of Danish middle-class social attitudes and politics and nostalgia and the media coverage thereof.
In the end, the "true" identity of the titular mystery child was not really all that surprising and telegraphed a couple of times in the plot, though rather red-herringly, and the part-time narrator quasi-mocks the apparent coincidences which tie everything together (though that may be a pre-emptive compensatory move on the part of the author to shore up sponginess in the deeply-laid-plot). The actual surprise lay in the culprits behind some of the murders, which was kind of ambiguous because now I'm wondering if a couple of the other apparent accidents were intended not to have been, but there's a rather ambiguous wrap-up to the characters and their fates.
Mild-to-medium-ish recommend if you think you'd like this kind of thing and can pick it up during deep-discount sale. It's certainly an acquired taste with probably a very specific sort of audience appeal, and the ending could be clearer and stronger, IMHO, but as a psychological portrait of the isolation and loneliness of what the author seems to think is the devastation caused by secretive closed adoptions (apparently Valeur himself is an adoptee as well) and the hypocrisy and corruption he seems to see in the idyllically attempted-homogenized Danish society past and present, it's interestingly enough portrayed and probably worth giving a try if it's obtainable at a low cost and you want to read about those sorts of themes.
Earlier, finished Icelandic journalist-turned-author (but apparently not an adoptee, to the best of my knowledge)
Árni Thórarinsson's
Season of the Witch, another $2 sale buy which was perfectly readable standalone, but which I found out after the fact was actually the 4th in his series starring Einar, a journalist in Northern Iceland but which got translated solo because apparently this was the award-winning volume of the lot.
Again, like the Danish journalist-turned-author offering I read, this was a sort of psychological circling of a crime, where again a journalist character tries to figure out a motive for a seemingly nonsensical occurrence and kind of solves it unintentionally by accident.
This one has Afternoon News crime reporter Einar looking into the mysterious death of a popular high school student actor who was slated to star in a particular play (and also a woman who mysteriously fell overboard during a corporate retreat trip).
Again, it's done not so much by direct Clue-finding, but rather by indirect sleuthing, as Einar uses his journalistic skills to look into the past and present of the victims and their connections in an attempt to piece together a picture of who they were and what they were involved with that someone could have wanted to try and ultimately succeeded in killing them, in between having to deal with the day-to-day banality of man-on-the-street-reporting and office politics of his otherwise unglamorous day job.
As with The Seventh Child, there are a number of the-cows-are-not-what-they-seem* turns to the investigation which aren't really so much "twists" as naturally occurring but slightly unexpected in direction meanders in the course of tracing the source of the crime-within-a-crime, and some surprising things tie together in the end.
Medium recommend if you're looking for a partial-psychological-portrait kind of mystery-ish sleuth investigation set in an isolated Icelandic environ (actually, Akureyri is Iceland's 2nd largest city, IIRC, but it has something like 15,000 inhabitants compared to Reyjavik's 120,000-ish, so there's a kind of massive disproportionality to their regional demographics, which makes crime thrillers set outside the capital weirdly interesting in comparison).
I actually rather liked this one, enough that I'd have been willing to buy more (on sale) from AmazonCrossing, but apparently they're not translating any more installments. So if I want to read #5 and upwards, I'll have to turn to Seuil, who have the French-language rights (apparently #1-3 only exist in Icelandic, and probably aren't e-book-ized, at least not in a form available to Canadians).
But it's another one of those things where I can see that the appeal might not be particularly generalized, especially for the genre audience that AmazonCrossing is marketing it at.
* Okay, it should really be a Twin Peaks reference with owls, but I first came across this bit of pop-culture trivia via reruns of Darkwing Duck, which had an episode called Twin Beaks featuring sentient bipedal cows which came "from the planet Larson on The Far Side of the galaxy".