January 2024
Tokyo, 1958. Teiko marries Kenichi Uhara, ten years her senior, an advertising man recommended by a go-between. After a four-day honeymoon, Kenichi vanishes. Teiko travels to the coastal and snow-bound city of Kanazawa, where Kenichi was last seen, to investigate his disappearance. When Kenichi’s brother comes to help her, he is murdered, poisoned in his hotel room. Soon, Teiko discovers that her husband’s disappearance is tied up with the so-called “pan-pan girls”, women who worked as prostitutes catering to American GIs after the war. Now, ten years later, as the country is recovering, there are those who are willing to take extreme measures to hide that past. Point Zero is by Seichõ Matsumoto.
March 2024
The Translator is by Harriet Crawley. Clive Franklin, a Russian language expert in the Foreign Office, is summoned unexpectedly to Moscow to act as translator for the British Prime Minister. His life is turned on its head when, after more than a decade, he discovers that his former lover, Marina Volina, is now the interpreter to the Russian President. At the embassy, Clive learns of a Russian plot to cut the undersea cables linking the US to the UK which would paralyse communications and collapse the Western economy. Marina stuns Clive with the news that she’s ready to help stop the attack, betraying her country for a new identity and a new life. Clive becomes the go-between, relaying Marina’s intelligence to MI6 back in London. What are the odds that two lovers, running the Moscow marathon with the FSB on their backs, can save Western Europe from economic meltdown?
May 2024
Hot Stage is by Anita Nair. A Bangalore police procedural featuring Inspector Borei Gowda, a splendidly grumpy, hard-drinking, deeply flawed character whose chaotic home life includes an absent wife, an estranged son and an enigmatic mistress. It all begins when elderly Professor Mudgood is murdered in his kitchen at 2 am on a November night. As Gowda investigates, he discovers that many people might have wanted the professor dead. He had been a vocal critic of the Hindutva Movement whose ethnic nationalism has gained traction recently, often at the expense of Islamic and Christian minorities. Also disturbing is the fact that the professor's extensive property in the centre of bustling Bangalore would be a gold mine in the hands of ruthless developers with access to corrupt politicians. And there is no shortage of such characters, even in the professor's immediate entourage. The fast-paced plot has many surprising twists leading to an ominous end, but police work is not just about going out and catching crooks. All kinds of office politics, caste politics and other considerations make Gowda's life complicated.
June 2024
October 1944, in the Republic of Salò, a German puppet state in the north of Italy and the last fascist stronghold in the country. After months of ferocious fighting on the Gothic Line, Colonel Martin Bora of the Wehrmacht is handed a new, red-hot case. Transferred to the town of Salò on the shore of Lake Garda, he must investigate the theft of a precious painting of Venus by Titian, stolen with uncanny ease from a local residence. While Bora’s inquiry proceeds among many difficulties, discovering three dead bodies throws an even more sinister light on the scene. The victims are female, very beautiful, apparently dead by their own hand but in fact, elegantly murdered. Is it the work of a serial killer, or are the homicides somehow related to the stolen Venus? Why were intriguing clues left behind for Bora to find? And why is there an official attempt to make the investigator himself appear as the culprit? Caught in an unforeseeable web of events, hounded by the Gestapo (for years at his heels on the charge of anti-Nazi activities), hopelessly in love with an enigmatic, real-flesh “Venus,” Bora must resort to all his courage and ability – not only to solve the mystery and expose the perpetrator, but also, in a breathtaking crescendo, to try to save himself from the firing squad and secure an unlikely way out... The Venus of Salò by Ben Pastor.
July 2024
It all begins with Kalmann in hot water. He’s at the FBI Headquarters in Washington, arrested during the Jan 6, 2021 riots at the Capitol Building. All he wanted was to visit his American father in the US for the Christmas holidays – but his dad takes him (and a group of MAGA friends) to the protests in Washington to “regain the house which is ours”. He is promptly arrested during the riots. Thanks to sympathetic FBI agent Dakota Leen, he’s soon on a plane back to Iceland. But not before Dakota informs him that his recently deceased grandfather was on an FBI list of suspected Russian spies working in Iceland during the Cold War. Back home, Kalmann begins to suspect that his grandfather’s death from “heart failure” was a murder. His maverick investigation uncovers another assassination and takes him to the site of a US radar station abandoned in the 1970s. So, there are now two deaths to be solved and the threat of more to come. Much to do for our unlikely amateur detective who somehow never loses heart. Kalmann and the Sleeping Mountain is by Joachim B Schmidt.
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