The Man from Beijing, by Henning Mankell, $25.95. It’s easy to see from this ambitious stand-alone thriller why Henning Mankell is Sweden’s top-selling writer and why he has such an enormous international following. A horrific mass murder in a tiny Swedish hamlet sets in motion a chain of events that have their roots nearly 150 years earlier, with the abduction of poor Chinese peasants to serve as forced labor in the construction of the U.S. transcontinental railway.
Swedish district judge Birgitta Roslin has ties to one of the families slaughtered in the massacre, and with some unexpected time on her hands, she discovers that another branch of the family was murdered in a similar fashion in Nevada.
Although the police, who think they’ve found the killer, aren’t especially interested in this information, Birgitta delves into family diaries concerning a long-ago ancestor who was a particularly brutal overseer of Chinese railway workers in the 19th century, and, certain that the murders are some sort of revenge, she follows a trail that eventually leads her to Beijing.
A former radical and admirer of Chairman Mao, Birgitta is both fascinated and horrified by the changes that have taken place in China over the last half century. She’s befriended by the government-employed sister of a corrupt and powerful entrepreneur, and as she comes closer to solving the murders, Birgitta begins to realize how much danger she has put herself in.
Layered into the gripping narrative is a thought-provoking study of modern-day China, in particular the country’s chilling long-term plan to colonize Africa. All the many story threads are skillfully entwined, aided by a seamless translation by Laurie Thompson.
The False Mermaid, by Erin Hart, $26. After appearing in two books set in Ireland, pathologist Nora Gavin, still haunted by the savage murder of her beautiful younger sister, Triona, three years earlier, returns to her home town of St. Paul, Minn.
She discovers that many new clues and witnesses have turned up since she left, and becomes increasingly convinced that her sister’s erratic and often shocking behavior before she was killed was probably induced by drugs.
While she desperately misses her Irish lover, archaeologist Cormac Maguire, she joins forces again with police detective Frank Cordova to reopen the case. While she and Frank were both certain that Triona’s controlling husband, Peter, was the murderer, the new information they turn up seems to point elsewhere. Meanwhile, Peter has remarried and is about to take his new bride and his daughter Elizabeth to Ireland for a holiday.
Interwoven throughout the story are ancient legends of the selkies, seals who shed their skins to become people, with the beautiful female selkies being held in thrall to human husbands as long as the men destroy or keep hidden their wives’ sealskins.
The latter part of the book takes place back on Ireland’s wild Donegal coast, where Nora and Cormac are reunited and take extreme measures to protect her young niece, Elizabeth. Like earlier books in the series, it’s beautifully written and atmospheric, as well as truly suspenseful.
Arcadia Falls, by Carol Goodman, $25. Goodman specializes in atmospheric literary thrillers, and her newest book, set at a boarding school for the arts in upstate New York, is an especially fine specimen of its type.
Recently widowed Meg Rosenthal, a specialist in folklore and fairy tales, takes a job teaching at Arcadia Falls and hopes her rebellious teenage daughter Sally will be able to make the adjustment. Once they approach the school, the landscape changes into something almost otherworldly, and the cottage in the forest, where they are expected to live, looks like an illustration from a fairy tale.
The founders of the school, now dead, were themselves the authors of a modern feminist fairy tale, “The Changeling,” which has long been a favorite of Meg’s, and one reason she took the job was to research their lives.
Meg finds a hidden journal that sheds some disturbing light on the events that led to the death of one of the two women, which are paralleled by spooky goings-on in the present day at the school.
The author weaves many topics — folklore, the meaning of fairy tales, pagan rituals, and the eternal problem of how (or if) women can be artists as well as mothers — into her gracefully written and engaging narrative.
Tom and Enid Schantz are freelancers who write regularly about new mysteries.
