The Sorbonne Affair by Mark Pryor

The Sorbonne Affiar: A Hugo Marston Novel by Mark Pryor --- 285 pages including Acknowledgements.

Who would imagine that a teaching seminar for aspiring novelists could lead to murder? Especially in Paris?

The seminar is conducted by Helen Hancock, an internationally bestselling American author of romance novels. Her career may have peaked, but three ambitious would-be novelists have scraped together the money to come to Paris for two weeks for the opportunity to learn about writing and the publishing business from a seasoned professional. 

Hancock is staying at the very upscale and exclusive Sorbonne Hotel, where she is a frequent guest. She's also working on her next book, and meeting with her French publishers to negotiate a new contract. Then by accident she discovers someone has hidden a camera in her room.

The American ambassador to France is an old friend, so she asks him for help.  Enter Hugo Marston, chief of security for the American Embassy in Paris. He knows the most likely person to to plant a camera in a guest's room is a hotel employee. But before he can begin to question the staff, a bellhop, Andrew Baxter, is found, stabbed, in a stairwell. When Hugo and his friend, Lieutenant Camille Lerens of the Paris police, search Baxter's room they find evidence of gambling debts and a laptop that was used to download images from the hidden camera.

So now Hugo knows who hid the camera in Hancock's room, but not why; and it seems likely that Baxter was working for someone else, who may just be the person who killed him.

Meanwhile, Hugo is distracted by the news that a man with a big grudge against him and his friend Tom Green has been released from prison back home in Texas. Tom is convinced that Rick Cofer is out for blood. When Hugo is attacked in the street just outside his apartment, Tom worries that Cofer has found his way to Paris.

The seventh entry in Pryor's Hugo marston series features a complex plot with plenty of suspects and red herrings thrown in the mix, and as always, wonderful descriptions of Paris for wannabe travelers to savor.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Bonjour Paris.com

Click HERE to read the review from the Manhattan Book Review.

Click HERE to read the review from the Internet Review of Books blog.

The Blood Strand by Chris Ould

The Blood Strand: A Faroes Novel by Chris Ould --- 435 pages

The first in a trio of crime novels by British author Chris Ould set in the Faroes Islands, an archipelago located about 200 miles north/northwest of Scotland, between Norway and Iceland. The Faroes today are part of Denmark. The population of about 80,000 people speak Faroese, a language descended from Old Norse. The islands are spectacularly scenic, and provide a brooding atmosphere for Ould's tale.

His mother took Jan Reyna away from his home in the Faroe Islands as a very young child, and then committed suicide, leaving Jan to be raised by her sister and her sister's husband in England.  Not surprisingly then Reyna thinks of himself as British, not Faroese. He doesn't speak the language, even though his aunt and uncle speak it.  Now a grown man and a homicide detective, Reyna knows almost nothing about his father, but has many unanswered questions about his mother. When he finally decides to return to the islands Reyna discovers that his estranged father has just suffered a major stroke under suspicious circumstances. He meets the Faroese police inspector investigating the case, Hjalti Hentze, and gradually becomes involved, only to finds himself learning more about his long-lost family’s secrets than he may want to know.

For fans of Nordic Noir and police procedurals, this is the start of a great series.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus.

Click HERE to read the review from blogcritics.org

Dreaming Spies by Laurie R. King

Dreaming Spies: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes by Laurie R. King --- 331 pages

 The adventure begins on a cool spring afternoon in Sussex. Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes have just returned home from Lisbon to find a peculiar addition to their garden: a distinctive stone they last saw in the Imperial gardens in Kyoto.

The stone reminds them of  another adventure one that ended tragically. On their way back from India, en route to San Francisco to sort out Russell's family affairs, the couple encounters a young Japanese woman who asks their help in foiling a blackmailer. Only after Russell and Holmes agree do they discover that the blackmailer's target is the Prince Regent Hirohito of Japan.

The most entertaining part of the book consists of Russell and Holmes' up close and personal encounters with daily life in the rural villages of 1924 Japan, as they travel the Nakasendo Road up the Kiso Valley, from the town of Arima to the village of Mojiro-joku, in the guise of Buddhist pilgrims.  Also interesting are the descriptions of the Bodleian Library and its librarians in Oxford.

The seventeenth century itinerant poet and master of haiku is frequently invoked in these pages, as is Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff of Henry the Fourth and Fifth, and the English poet Matthew Arnold, whose "dreaming spires" of Oxford become the punning title of this book in a sly reference to the Japanese speaker's difficulties in pronouncing the letter "r" in English.

This is the thirteenth book in the Mary Russell series, but chronologically this one fills the previous gap between The Game (No. Seven), and Locked Rooms (No. Eight) and it;s immediate sequel, The Language of Bees (No. Nine).

Click HERE to read an interview with Laurie R. King in the San Francisco Examiner.

Click HERE to view the book trailer for Dreaming Spies on Youtube.

Black Skies by Arnaldur Indridason

Black Skies: An Inspector Erlendur Novel by Arnaldur Indridason; translated from the Iclandic by Victoria Cribb --- 330 pages

To oblige an old school friend, Detective Sigurdur Oli agrees to make an "unofficial" visit to dissuade a blackmailer who is trying to extort money with sexually explicit photographs. But when Oli arrives on the blackmailer's doorstep he finds her critically injured and surprises her assailant, who runs from the scene.

Oli's investigation is further complicated by his own feelings of bitterness and resentment, as his personal life is falling apart and his career seems to have hit a dead end, while so many of his contemporaries are rocketing to success in the wild financial boom Iceland is experiencing. When the victim dies in hospital, Sigurdur Oli is faced with investigating the murder without revealing his own reasons for being present at the murder scene.

This is the ninth entry in the Inspector Erlendur series; interestingly, it is written in parallel to the eighth novel, Outrage, in which Erlendur is also absent under increasingly mysterious circumstances. In these two novels, Erledur's two subordinates, Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli, are working on their own, without Erlendur's guidance. Elinborg must learn to trust her instincts and assert herself; Sigurdur Oli must learn question his assumptions and take responsibility for his mistakes.

Moving between the brazen greed of Reykjavik's nouveau riche and the self-destructive dispair of lives lost to poverty, drugs and squalor, Black Skies is another gripping story from Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger winner, Arnaldur Indridason.