FRANCE



Fred Vargas

Commissaire Adamsberg is the creation of the French historian, archaeologist and author Fred Vargas.
Adamsberg is one of the Parisian police forces’ most unusual and unorthodox members. He tends to ignore clues and obvious suspects – and often arrests people with strong alibis. He is a dreamer, often seeming distracted, and colleagues are frequently baffled by his amazing success rate. He has a deep understanding of human nature, allowing him to predict suspect’s moves before they themselves make them.

Varga writing is of the highest quality he even won the CWA International Dagger for translated crime fiction, along with her translator Siân Reynolds, a staggering four times.

Denmark

Jussi Adler-Olsen

Jussi Adler-Olsen is a Danish author of Scandinavian crime fiction. He is best known in English-speaking countries for his Department Q series. His novels have been sold in 36 countries around in the world, including the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, Spain, Russia, The Netherlands, Japan, Germany and China. He was the most popular author in Germany in the year 2011, despite not being German.

Jussi Adler-Olsen became a published author in 1985 with a non-fiction book on Groucho Marx. His first foray into fiction was Alfabethuset (The Alphabet House) in 1997. His first novel to be published in English was Mercy (UK)/The Keeper of Lost Causes (US). Below is a list of Jussi Adler-Olsen’s books in order of when they were originally released:

NORWAY

Thomas Enger
Thomas Enger was born in Oslo in 1973, but grew up in Jessheim. He has an education in journalism, and has also studied sports and history. He worked at the Norwegian online newspaper Nettavisen for nine years.

He has composed music and written books since the age of 18. He is also working on a musical.

Enger's first book, Skinndød, was published in 2010. It is the first book in a series of at least six featuring crime journalist Henning Juul. The second installment, Fantomsmerte, was released in the fall of 2011; Blodtåke, the third book, is scheduled for a 2012 release.

ICELAND







ARNLDUR INDRIDSON,







Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson is a brilliant cop, but also a gloomy and thoroughly anti-social figure who guards his privacy jealously. When he's not doggedly pursuing a case, he is hunkered down at home brooding over its details. He passes his solitary time reading his strange library of papers about people lost in the wilds of Iceland. Why? Because the ghosts of his past give him no quarter.







Created by Icelandic author Arnaldur Indridason , Detective Erlendur is as enigmatic as they come. His exploits have captivated fans through 11 novels, of which nine have been translated into English. Although Strange Shores wrapped up the original series, a prequel series featuring a younger Ilendur tells us of his earlier cases going back to the 1970s. We thought it would be a good idea to write a guide to the detective, and hopefully it’ll clear up any questions you have about the series and which ones are available in English.







RAGNAR JONNSSON







ABOUT THE DARK ICELAND SERIES:



The series is set in and around Siglufjörður: an idyllically quiet fishing village in Northern Iceland, where no one locks their doors accessible only via a small mountain tunnel. Ari Thór Arason: a rookie policeman on his first posting, far from his girlfriend in Reykjavik with a past that he's unable to leave behind.







SNOWBLIND: When a young woman is found lying half-naked in the snow, bleeding and unconscious, and a highly esteemed, elderly writer falls to his death in the local theatre, Ari is dragged straight into the heart of a community where he can trust no one, and secrets and lies are a way of life. An avalanche and unremitting snowstorms close the mountain pass, and the 24-hour darkness threatens to push Ari over the edge, as curtains begin to twitch, and his investigation becomes increasingly complex, chilling and personal. Past plays tag with the present and the claustrophobic tension mounts, while Ari is thrust ever deeper into his own darkness – blinded by snow, and with a killer on the loose. Taut and terrifying, Snowblind is a startling debut from an extraordinary new talent, taking Nordic Noir to soaring new heights.







NIGHTBLIND: The peace of a close-knit Icelandic community is shattered by the murder of a policeman - shot at point-blank range in the dead of night in a deserted house. With a killer on the loose and the dark Arctic waters closing in, it falls to Ari Thor to piece together a puzzle that involves tangled local politics, a compromised new mayor and a psychiatric ward in Reykjavik where someone is being held against their will...







Yrsa Sigurdardottir







Yrsa Sigurðardóttir (born in 1963) is an Icelandic writer of both crime novels and children's fiction. She has been writing since 1998. Her début crime novel was translated into English by Bernard Scudder. The central character in her crime novels so far is Thóra Gudmundsdóttir (Þóra Guðmundsdóttir), a lawyer. Yrsa has also written for children, and won the 2003 Icelandic Children's Book Prize with Biobörn.







Michael Ridpath







Before becoming a writer, I used to work in the City of London as a bond trader. I have written eight thrillers set in the worlds of business and finance, but I am now trying my hand at something different. Where The Shadows Lie, the first in a series featuring an Icelandic detective named Magnus Jonson, was published in 2010. The third book in the series, Meltwater, is out in the UK this summer. My books have been translated into over 30 languages (including Icelandic).







ITALY







Andrea Camilleri







Inspector Salvo Montalbano is a Sicilian fictional character that was created by Italian writer Andrea Camilleri. The novels are written in a mixture of Italian and Sicilian dialects. AS you would expect much of the action takes place on the island of Sicily. They are detective novels intertwined with humour, and social comment







Donna Leon







Donna Leon born September 28, 1942, in Montclair, New Jersey[2]) is the American author of a series of crime novels set in Venice, Italy, featuring the fictional hero Commissario Guido Brunetti. In 2003, she received the Corine Literature Prize.







Leon lived in Venice for over 30 years and now resides in the small village of Val Müstair in the mountains of Grisons in Switzerland.[3] She also has a home in Zurich.[4] In 2020 she became a Swiss citizen.[5] She was a lecturer in English literature for the University of Maryland University College – Europe (UMUC-Europe)[6] in Italy and taught English from 1981 to 1990 at an American military base in Italy.[7] She has stopped teaching and concentrated on writing and other cultural activities in the field of music (especially baroque music).[when?]







Her Commissario Brunetti novels all take place in or around Venice. They are written in English and have been translated into many foreign languages, but – at Leon's request – not into Italian.[8] The ninth Brunetti novel, Friends in High Places, won the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger in 2000. German television has produced 26 Commissario Brunetti episodes for broadcast







Sweden



Hakan Nesser



A recurring main character is called Van Veeteren, a detective in the early novels and later the owner of an antique books shop. These books play out in a fictitious city called Maardam, said to be located in northern Europe in a country which is never named but resembles Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland and Germany. The names however are mostly Dutch.

With his 2006 crime novel Människa utan hund ("Human without Dog") Nesser introduced a new main character, Inspector Gunnar Barbarotti, a Swedish police inspector of Italian descent. He has remained the main protagonist in Nesser's crime books since then. Barbarotti is a more upbeat character than Van Veeteren and the books are firmly set in Sweden, although the town of Kymlinge is fictitious and named after an "abandoned tube station" in Stockholm.



SPAIN



CARSLOS RUIZ ZAFON (d June 2020)



Carlos Ruiz Zafón is the author of six novels, including the international phenomenon The Shadow of the Wind, and The Angel Game. His work has been published in more than forty different languages, and honoured with numerous international awards.



IRELAND



JO SPAIN

Jo Spain is the author of the Inspector Tom Reynolds series. Her first book, top ten bestseller With Our Blessing, was a finalist in the 2015 Richard and Judy Search for a Bestseller. The Confession her first standalone thriller, was a number one bestseller and translated all over the world.





DERVLA McTIERNAN



Dervia McTiernan is a crime fiction writer. She was born in County Cork. Dervia McTiernan first became officially published in 2018 This was the year that saw the debut of her first ever book, The Ruin. It’s the first of the Cormac Reilly series. The 2019 sequel is titled The Scholar. Dervia didn’t always set out to be a writer.



TANNA FRENCH

Tana French, born 1973 in Burlington, Vermont, is an American-Irish writer and theatrical actress; a longstanding resident of Dublin, Ireland. Her debut novel In the Woods (2007), a psychological mystery, won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry awards for best first novel.The Independent has referred to her as being the First Lady of Irish Crime, who very quietly has become a huge international name among fiction readers.



Germany

Len Deighton



Bernard Samson Fictional Character

Bernard Samson is a fictional character created by Len Deighton. Samson is a middle-aged and somewhat jaded intelligence officer working for the Secret Intelligence Service – usually referred to as "the Department" in the novels. He is a central character in three trilogies written by Deighton, set in the years 1983;1988, with a large gap between 1984 and 1987.



Russia



Martin Cruz Smith



Who is Arkady Renko and what does he do?



Arkady is a chief investigator for the Soviet Militia within Moscow. He is in charge of different homicide investigations. The sequels are that he takes different roles from a worker on a fish processing ship to the militiaman worker. Born in the nomenclatura, Renko is son to General Kiril Renko who is at the Red Army.



What many of these books need are maps of the country/town and recipes of what each character has eaten,