Shanghai Redemption by Qiu Xiaolong

This mystery is wrapped not only in an enigma, but in carefully applied layers of literary reference, contemporary historical realism, and socio-cultural analysis.

After 15 years of walking a knife edge of Party sensitivities, Inspector Chen is suddenly stripped of his job as the Shanghai Police Bureau's Special Case Squad. He gets a new job title -- and title is the operative word. Chen and his colleagues in the precinct know this empty 'promotion' is no more than an effort to sideline one of his investigations. But which one, and why? The wily inspector still has his brain, his poetry and other resources. Obliged to shuttle back and forth on the high speed train between Shanghai and Suzhou, where he's having his father's gravestone renovated, Chen consults his gray cells as well as trusted friends of the utmost discretion to help him investigate.

Qiu Xiaolong is a master of irony and double entendre, as we observe in this layered description of a traditional hotel room in Suzhou. "On one wall, there was an impressive row of pictures showing high-ranking party leaders in the fifties and sixties, eloquently documenting the hotel’s glorious past. The wall opposite displayed a long rice-coloured silk scroll of a seventh-century Tang poem copied by a modern calligrapher."

He portrays the status of women in China under 'Socialism with Chinese characteristics.' Among Qiu's fascinating range of characters are a Suzhou opera singer, the discarded ernai, (non-status concubine), of a Party official, and Chen's friend and former colleague, Detective Yu. Yu's intrepid wife Peqin helps her husband's inquiries in places where he is unable to venture. We also meet Party members who subtly threaten Chen using anodyne phrases, as well as expensive lawyers and American accountants who maintain that they're not obliged to tell the police a thing.

The topsy-turvy world of contemporary Shanghai is an excellent setting for this satisfying mystery. The booming city is rife with corruption, new money, 'Red Princelings' and 'Big Bucks.' While having concubines and playing mahjong are nominally illegal, "every service you can imagine" is for sale in the Heavenly World night club. In such places, officials avoid internet exposure by entering unseen through hidden underground parking access. "Red songs" enjoy an ironic comeback, while 'naked officials' ship their families and money overseas and then stay back with their ernai to see how the political wind blows. 

Meanwhile, skyrocketing Shanghai real estate prices mean many in the city must bury their dead in nearby Suzhou. Thus, the annual Qingming observance leads to a cemetery visit rush hour for the new high-speed train system to cope with. 

Big Sky by Kate Atkinson

Jackson Brodie is back. Now middle-aged, he sees himself as "a walking, talking history lesson...except that nobody is interested in learning anything from him." Deemed a Luddite by his twenty-something daughter, he regards his teenage son Nathan and remembers when he and his ex, Julia, created "the embryo that would one day sprawl its legs and fold its arms sarcastically."

When Nathan asks his dad for another ice cream, Jackson reflects that for this generation, "never enough" is "the dominant trait." They've been "bred to consume." Darkly, he predicts that capitalism will devour itself, "thereby fulfilling its raison d'etre in an act of self-destruction, aided by the dopamine feedback loop." Meanwhile, the insatiable Nathan and his fellow teens are "living sandwich boards, covered in free advertising for corporate evil."

Jackson remains "a friend to anarchy;" he still magnetizes hapless people who need rescuing. He sees bad things around him, and wishes he could fix them all. Remembering the twelve-year-old with a unicorn backpack he saw get into a car a couple of days ago, he still wonders. Is she safe at home, after being berated by loving parents for coming back late? "He hoped so, but his gut told him differently. In his (long) experience, your brain might mislead you, but your gut always told you the truth."

In spite of his determination to serve society and his intuitions about things that don't look right, Jackson still has time to think philosophical thoughts. Out jogging in a quiet wood, he ponders the Zen koan about whether a tree falling in the forest makes a noise if nobody is there to hear it. When he trips on a root and goes flying, he fancies he can "hear the sound of one hand clapping."

Jackson is not the only character to provide humour in this intricately plotted book. The grotesquely egotistical has-been comedian Barclay Jack gazes gloomily into the mirror before a show, confirming his fear that he looks his age. His spirits droop, and when his stomach also swoops within him, he wonders: "Stage fright? Or a dodgy curry?"

Another actress, Julia, comments laconically, "The class war's over. Everyone lost." Atkinson applies her legendary humour to description as well as plot and characters. Her evocation of a "modish" bar "so dark you could hardly see your drink in front of you," made me laugh out loud.

With inimitable sleight-of-hand, the author reinstates characters from Jackson's past books and ties them up in a contemporary mystery involving a "magic circle" of people in very high places. For far too long, they get away with trafficking girls. The twists and turns that eventually lead to their comeuppance make this a most satisfying tale.

Involuntary Witness by Gianrico Carofiglio

As a former prosecutor specializing in organized crime, novelist Gianrico Carofiglio has a unique perspective. He has also advised the anti-Mafia committee in the Italian parliament and served five years in the Italian senate.

Entering the world of the depressed, middle-aged lawyer Guido Guerrieri, we follow him through the law courts, bars, and beaches of Bari as he falls to the bottom of an emotional well, and join him as he slowly climbs out.

Ironically, it is the body of a child found down a real well that galvanizes Guerrieri. In a mysterious sequence of events, he is returned to life and purpose when he finds himself defending a Senegalese immigrant who is about to be convicted of the child's murder on the basis of wildly circumstantial evidence.

Through Guido's memories and reflections, the reader sees the numbing people he used to hang out with. Among this set, marriages of convenience, drinking, partying and meaningless affairs are commonplace. Some lawyers get paid in cash, give no receipts, declare improbably low incomes, and accept money they know has ties to organized crime. When Guido visits his client in prison, he is repelled by the routine unproven "violence committed on the prisoners to improve discipline."

After one successful court defence, we see Guido attacked on the street by thugs who disapprove. An amateur boxer, he's able to beat back the gangsters, only to have his tires slashed and his car damaged. To stop this escalating, he must work through a shady intermediary who visits Guido's attackers and returns with the message that if he does not report the damage to his car, but pays for it himself, the feud will end.

Though this novel is more noir than cosy, the narrator can be funny. Indeed, he places great value on a sense of humour, in particular, the ability to laugh at oneself. And speaking of noir, I haven't dyed the black-and-white cover red for effect. At this season, I mostly read outside; the colour is the result of the way our patio umbrella filters light.

Norwegian by Night, by Derek B. Miller

This brilliant novel by Derek B. Miller moves seamlessly from Oslo to Gramercy Park to the wars in Vietnam and the Balkans. Seen mostly through the eyes of an 82-year-old Jewish ex-Marine living in Norway, the story weaves in and out of conversations with people living and dead.

Sheldon may be feeling his age, possibly even suffering from the onset of dementia. His mind teems with thoughts and memories. A Vietnam vet, he carries a heavy burden of guilt and regret, even though he knows the deaths he feels worst about were dealt by the hands of fate and history.

When the aftermath of the Balkan wars arrives in Oslo, all hell breaks loose in the apartment of his granddaughter and grandson-in-law while they're out. Sheldon's military training kicks in, and he steps up to do what he can.

Miller's work is full of pithy lines that carry weighty ideas. "Only the educated stop to look for words -- having enough to occasionally misplace them." His characters' thoughts are also freighted with philosophy.

In a serious mood, Sheldon recalls how soldiers in Vietnam were imprinted with horrible smells. When ordered to approach a plane crash in case the pilot is still alive, the soldiers smell "fuel, which burned with a different odor than napalm, rice paddies, cattle and people." But burning fuel is "only a 2 on the gag-ometer" the soldiers have devised to classify the stenches that surround them; a 10 is reserved "for the smell of letters received from bureaucrats."

Looking back, Sheldon recalls that "It was not a grand moment" when he "watched as his son became a man." Without witnesses or heroics, Saul's "small gesture of dignity and respect between one man and another," opened "the possibility of a better world." Behind these simple words, we glimpse the vast and complex requirements demanded by society to satisfy honour among men.

The rules of honour also extend to ordinary life, causing Sheldon, in the presence of his young son, to shrug aside two bodyguards and punch out an anti-Semite who refuses to let him play golf at a country club. He is confident that the man will not complain to the police, reasoning that "The only thing worse for an anti-Semite than a Jew is being beaten up by a Jew." And therefore, "The fewer people who knew about it, the better."

Once father and son are safely away from the scene of the fight, Sheldon lectures Saul, saying 'This country is what you make it...you don't make excuses for America's bullshit. That's what the Nazis and commies do. The Fatherland. The Motherland. America isn't your parent. It's  your kid. And today I made America a place where you get your nose broken for telling a Jew he can't play a round of golf.' Sadly, in spite of its important lesson, this moment "that Saul would never forget... ruined the whole day."

Riding along the back roads of Norway on his motorcycle, Lars, the gentle modern Norwegian who still hunts animals, ponders the condition of being a Jew. He finds something unsettling about the way they speak as witnesses to history. "Since Egypt. Since the morning of Western civilization, when its light shone west from Jerusalem and Athens, and blanketed Rome and all that it would leave behind. They've watched the Western tribes and empires rise and fall--from the Babylonians to the Gauls, from the Moors to the Habsburgs to the Ottomans--and have alone remained. They have seen it all. And the rest of us wait for the verdict that is still, even now, to come."

Behind him on the bike, his wife Rhea wonders if her beloved grandfather really is succumbing to dementia. "Imagining what Sheldon would say in response to her doubts, she can't help but smile. 'Sanity is the thick soup of distraction we immerse ourselves in to keep from remembering that we're gonna bite it.'"

Sigrid, an Oslo police officer with her finger firmly on the pulse of the era, reflects that, "Recent immigration from Africa and Eastern Europe--and Muslim countries farther east--created a new social tension in the city that still lacked the political maturity to address it." With the liberals expounding "limitless tolerance," and the conservatives "racist or xenophobic," people "debate from philosophical positions but never from ones grounded in evidence, and so no sober consideration [is] being given to the very real question haunting Western civilization--namely, How tolerant should we be of intolerance?"

This novel portrays themes of deep resonance: guilt, regret, revenge, war and the cycle of violence; the pressures of history and the inescapable solitude of the self. Underpinning the stunning novels of Derek B. Miller is an impressive resume. Undoubtedly, his work with the UN, governments and think tanks, as well as his American - Swiss education and the fact that he lives in Norway add to the broad international perspective of his work.

The Little Red Chairs by Edna O'Brien

I'm grateful to the student in my recent SFU Mystery course who told me about this novel. An Irish writer living in England, Edna O'Brien was 84 when this "chilling masterpiece" came out in 2015. In a long writing life, O'Brien has won significant international prizes. She has also been vilified and seen her work banned and burned.

In an Irish village, we meet middle-aged Fildelma, who longs for a child, but with her much older husband, this dream seems dead. We also glimpse European migrants who have come to Ireland to work, earn and survive. One young man has been displaced and traumatized by the Balkan wars.

He is the only villager who is not impressed by the newly arrived healer. But Dr. Vlad soon charms the ladies, and many of the men as well. Fidelma gets disastrously embroiled in the doctor's life, and ends up fleeing to London. There she is befriended by displaced people who have left their own countries following traumas far worse than her own.

This is a book about sexual politics, about ethnic identity, about shaming and blaming, about the the human tendency to look away from what we do not wish to see, and about the meaning of home. With Fidelma, we seek to understand the nature of evil, and share her relief when in the end, she escapes its toils and finds the courage to "come home to herself."

This book is an absolutely brilliant portrayal of contemporary history, and an amazing read.

The Afrikaner by Ariana Dagnino

"The past always resurfaces," and "change has its own dynamic." So the protagonist is told in the gripping new novel by Ariana Dagnino.

South African Paleoarchaeologist Zoe du Plessis is on a dual quest. When tragedy strikes, she tries to escape her pain by redoubling her effort to find evidence of early humans in the Kalahari.

Her family can trace their roots in Africa back three hundred years. The Du Plessis were Huguenots. Fleeing France to escape persecution, they went first to Holland then on to the Cape region of South Africa where they planted grapes and re-established themselves in the wine business.

Absorbing though Zoe's work is, it can't help her cope with the pressure of her Afrikaner heritage in the post-apartheid era. She is filled with pain, guilt and uncertainty. To free herself, Zoe must let go self-blame and toxic secrets.

Since childhood, she has kept her promise to Georgina, the family housekeeper, to never speak about something she was not meant to witness. Now she uncovers shocking secrets in her own family -- history that explains why her aunt and grandmother were shunned by other relatives. The disgraced Aunt Claire has left her a journal containing clues that lead Zoe to the truth. But knowing is not enough; she must share this explosive information with someone she trusts. Meanwhile, she learns that her brother Andre has been keeping secrets of his own.

Journeying with Zoe towards a more peaceful acceptance of who she is, we understand her in the wider context of her history. A poet she meets, a fellow-Afrikaner, speaks of their people's 'collective self-delusion.' Due to uncertainty about their place and identity, he says, "a whole nation was made to believe that ethnic pride and culture could only come from race." Now, though he admits the "the Rainbow Nation is an appealing brand name for a torn nation trying to heal itself," he finds this idea too simplistic. Integration and hybridization are natural evolutionary processes that "can't be socially engineered."

Pondering the complications of her nation, Zoe notices how other tribes resent the Zulus, and how black and Coloured South Africans feel their jobs are threatened by the influx of blacks from neighbouring countries including Congo, Zimbabwe and Malawi.

In this fascinating glimpse of contemporary Southern Africa, we travel from the camel thorns of the Kalahari to Stone Town in Zanzibar. We observe some customs of the San or Bushmen, who "gather their veld food with the self-assurance of an inveterate city shopper."

We also glimpse fallout from border skirmishes between South Africa and Mozambique, seen by locals as "a proxy war for the democracies of the West." As one man bitterly remarks, "They called us racists, but we came in handy when it came time to keep the commies in check."

We witness the behaviour of diehard racists and meet South Africans of various ethnicities as they work together in an effort to realize a new way forward. We hear how during the Apartheid regime, scientists were shunned at conferences, and glimpse recently discovered (1995) hominid footprints on the beach at Langebaan.

The challenge for each "poor human being biting into the thorns of existence" is to face up to the past, and then make the present better. The fact that South Africans are by no means alone in needing to do so makes this topic novel thematically universal as well.

Wash this Blood Clean from my Hand by Fred Vargas

In this volume of the Commissaire Adamsberg investigates series, Fred Vargas features a visit by Paris police to GRC HQ in Gatineau, Quebec. This leads to some hilarious linguistic and cultural miscommunication between casual Quebecois cops and their formal French colleagues.

From the medieval Strasbourg Cathedral to the strange Pink Lake in the Quebec bush, the intuitive Commissaire Adamsberg dogs the Trident, a serial killer whose crimes span five decades, and may even reach into the afterworld.

Delightfully drawn characters sport all kinds of oddities and contradictions. Robin Hood figure Josette, the aged "hackeress," makes a castle of her rice pudding at the dinner table, provoking her elderly hostess Clementine to ask her not to play with her food.

Across this same dinner table, Adamsberg ponders the fate of his boss, who has taken a big risk to support him. Brezillon, he explains, "puts out his fag with his thumb without burning himself," making him a "good guy." Thus, reasons the commissaire, he "can't compromise him."

Sheltered by the two aged women, Adamsberg thinks, plans and investigates. While Josette helps by hunching happily over her hacking, Clementine plies the nervous and underfed detective with cookies and maple syrup, and stands over him to ensure that he is "eating up as instructed."

Meanwhile, Adamsberg helps his hostess by carrying the shopping. In her kitchen, he learns to peel potatoes properly, removing the eyes first. Obediently stirring the pan in a figure eight so as "not to  ruin the bechamel sauce," he imagines a confrontation with the villain, telling himself he will not "be reduced to ashes by the pressure of a cane on his chest from this would-be aristocrat."

Tongue firmly in cheek, the author treats us to a wide variety of classic scenes. We see the village priest's memory as "a telephoto lens into the past," and witness an exhumation in the winter rain. Sensing the approach of a hunch, the eccentric detective treats intuitions "like an angler handling a bite," and refrains from pouncing on an idea until it is "safely landed in his conscious brain."

Much depends on the frail old hacker, but big barriers must first be overcome. As Adamsberg comments sadly, 'you can't break into the files of life like you can into computers.'

The plot is outrageous, straining the very edges of credibility. Yet the authorial hand evokes instinctive trust in the reader, who is more than willing to suspend disbelief for as long as it takes to untangle the tale. A historian and archeologist by profession, Parisienne author Fred Vargas (her nom de plume) has taken the mystery genre by storm.