June’s Best International Crime Fiction

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This month’s best international releases for crime readers aren’t all strictly crime novels, but they all capture that peculiar blend of misery and beauty that drives the best works of noir fiction. This month’s selections include: a doomed romance in a refugee camp in Turkey, a Maltese Falcon-esque search for a statue in Cuba, a bizarre novel of behind-the-scenes manipulation and comical doubling out of Japan, and a bleak novel of intrigue and desperation set in Mexico City. As we all head out to finally travel, these novels serve as both guides and warnings, reminding us that there is much below the glossy surface wherever we may be.

Dolores Redondo, The North Face of the Heart
Translated by Michael Meigs
(Amazon Crossing)

Amaia Salazar, a detective from Northern Spain, has just joined the FBI Academy in Virginia when she gets a chance to hunt a serial killer known as the “Composer,” who’s been leaving a trail of bodies across the American South. While normally it can feel a bit odd to read a work in translation that’s set in your home country, Redondo, with the help of translator Michael Miegs, knocks it out of the park.

Leonardo Padura, The Transparency of Time
translated by Anna Kushner
(FSG)

From Padura, the crime fiction legend and giant of LatAm noir, comes a new Mario Conde novel, this one an epic occult history that leaps through time, place, and ideology to deliver one of the strangest, most alluring crime novels in years. Conde, now sixty and as ever full of disillusions and nostalgia, receives a new client, a former Marxist turned Santeria practitioner who wants Conde to track down a powerful statuette, la Virgen de Regla. It seems like Padura is getting more ambitious with each book, and here he’s bent the structures of the crime novel into an investigation on the astral plane, one that also happens to be a revealing commentary on the state of modern Cuba and the world pressing in on it. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief

Zülfü Livaneli, Disquiet
Translated by Brendan Freely
(Other Press)

Disquiet isn’t strictly a crime novel, but more of a noir meditation on war, doomed love, and trauma. A volunteer at a refugee camp falls in love with a young Yazidi woman, but their families condemn the romance, and tragedy soon follows.

Natsuko Imamura, The Woman in the Purple Skirt
Translated by Lucy North
(Penguin Books)

Don’t be dissuaded by the loneliness of the main character—The Woman in the Purple Skirt is a defiant and hysterical ode to the power of the woman alone. The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan watches the Woman in the Purple Skirt as she drifts through their neighborhood, conspicuous in her apartness, an object of children’s fear and adults’ admonishments. The Woman in the Purple Skirt is, in effect, everything the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan would like to be—she is noticed. She is feared. And thus, she is powerful.

The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan gets the Woman in the Purple Skirt a job in hospitality, and witnesses her slow blossoming into a friendlier, more confident and approachable version of herself. And the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan continues to watch as the Woman in the Purple Skirt’s newfound confidence gets her into more and more trouble…

Sergio Schmucler, The Guardian of Amsterdam Street
Translated by Jessie Mendez Sayer
(House of Anansi/Spiderline)

In what’s being described as “Roma meets A Gentleman in Moscow“, the 20th century’s most vivid and defining moments are witnessed in microcosm by a boy confined to the leftist Mexico City enclave of Amsterdam Street. The Guardian of Amsterdam Street has plenty of international intrigue and bleak set-pieces, but just as many moments of indescribable beauty and sublime intellect. A gorgeous work of literature that also just happens to be perfect for crime fans.

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