August 2009

December 24 - I haven't been able to update this site for some months, given the pressures of other work over the fall (see http://www.africafocus.org), but the books read in August featured a good selection of new authors for me, as well as books by some familiar authors.

Books set outside the United States included Colin Cotterill's Curse of the Pogo Stick, another in his well-crafted series featuring coroner Siri Paiboun in Laos under the Pathet Lao. Michael Genelin, in Siren of the Waters, features Slovak police officer Jana Matinova, in an investigation moving across multiple European borders. Kwei Quartey, of Ghana, is a welcome addition to the still too-small numbers of African mystery writers, with Wife of the Gods introducing Darko Dawson, on an investigation outside his home base of Accra, in the Volta region in the east of the country. And Swedish writer John Theorin, in Echoes from the Dead, takes us to the rarely featured region of the Baltic Sea, on the island of Öland.

Of those I read this month set in the United States, by far the best was James Sallis, Drive, set in Arizona and surrounding states with a professional stunt-driver who moonlights driving escape cars for robberies. J. A. Jance brings together her Seattle, Washington (J. P. Beaumont) and Cochise County, Arizona (Joanna Brady) series in Fira and Ice. Ridley Pearson's Under Currents also comes from a Seattle writer, and features the particular geography of the currents in and around that city.

C. J. Box and Linda Greenlaw capture different landscapes of rural America in Below Zero (Wyoming) and Fisherman's Bend (coastal Maine).