Print

 

Austria

J. Sydney Jones, The Empty Mirror. Mystery
A lawyer and a criminologist in Vienna help clear artist Gustav Klimt of accusations that he murdered a model.

Frank Tallis, A Death in Vienna.
In 1902, a detective joins forces with a follower of Sigmund Freud to solve several brutal murders.

 

Bosnia & Herzegovina

Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo.
In war-torn Sarajevo, a cellist plays for 22 days at the site of a mortar attack that killed 22 people.

 

Bulgaria

Annie Ward, The Making of June.
A woman accompanies her husband to Bulgaria but soon finds herself alone in an unfamiliar culture.

 

Cyprus

Sadie Jones, Small Wars.
A British officer brings his family to Cyprus in 1956 as resistance fighters seek union with Greece and oppose British rule.

 

Czech Republic

Kenneth Wishnia, The Fifth Servant.
In 16th century Prague, a synagogue sexton seeks the truth when a Christian girl is found dead in a Jewish businessman’s shop.

 

Denmark

Peter Hoeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow. Mystery
A woman's knowledge of snow reveals that a boy's death was no accident.

Christian Jungersen, The Exception.
When a nonprofit agency dealing with genocide receives death threats, employees blame a coworker.

 

Finland

James Thompson, Snow Angels. Mystery
During Lapland’s period of total darkness, a police chief investigates the murder of a Somali woman.

Jan Costin Wagner, Ice Moon. Mystery
A recently widowed detective takes the case of a woman smothered in her sleep.

 

France

Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog.
In a Paris apartment building, a concierge and a girl each have secrets they hide from the other residents.

Cara Black, Murder in the Marais. Mystery
A computer expert delivering a decrypted 1940s photo finds a dead woman with a swastika carved on her forehead.

Alexander Campion, The Grave Gourmet. Mystery
The body of an automobile executive is found in the refrigerator of a famous French restaurant.

Anna Gavalda, Hunting and Gathering.
A starving artist, a shy aristocrat and an obnoxious chef form a bond while living in a Paris apartment.

Claude Izner, Murder on the Eiffel Tower. Mystery
A bookseller suspects foul play when a woman allegedly dies of a bee sting at the opening of the Eiffel Tower.

Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah’s Key.
An American writer discovers what happened to a family during the 1942 roundup of Jews in Paris.

Martin Walker, Bruno, Chief of Police. Mystery
A police chief in Périgord has a leisurely job until an elderly Algerian immigrant is brutally murdered.

 

Germany

Rebecca Cantrell, A Trace of Smoke. Mystery
In 1931, a reporter investigates the death of her brother—a transvestite cabaret singer with liaisons in the Nazi party.

Robert Ford, The Student Conductor.
A Julliard dropout tries to restart his career by studying with a legendary conductor but gets involved with an East German defector.

Julia Franck, The Blindness of the Heart.
At the end of the war in Germany, a woman abandons her 7-year-old son in a train station.

Helen Grant, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden.
In a small German village, a schoolgirl shunned by her classmates tries to solve a girl’s mysterious disappearance.

Jonathan Rabb, Shadow and Light.
In 1927 Berlin, a police inspector is called to a movie studio to investigate an apparent suicide.

 

Great Britain

Deborah Crombie, And Justice There Is None. Mystery
The death of an antique dealer’s wife in Notting Hill may be related to an earlier murder.

Elizabeth Duncan, The Cold Light of Mourning. Mystery
In a Welsh town, a manicurist realizes she has a clue to the disappearance of a bride on her wedding day.

Will North, The Long Walk Home.
An American widower walks from Heathrow to Wales to scatter his wife’s ashes.

Ian Rankin, The Falls. Mystery
When a student disappears and a coffin containing a doll is found, Edinburgh cop John Rebus finds a pattern of similar memento mori dating to the 19th century.

A. D. Scott, A Small Death in the Great Glen. Mystery
In 1956, the new editor of the Highland Gazette promotes a typist to help him uncover small town secrets when a boy is found dead in a canal.

Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows, The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society.
In 1946, an author corresponds with the members of a book group that formed in Nazi-occupied Guernsey.

Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand.
In a small English village, a widowed army major forms a friendship with a Pakistani widow who runs the local shop.

Natasha Solomons, Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English.
A German Jew escapes with his family to England and is determined to assimilate, but when he’s not allowed to join a golf club he decides to build his own.

Marcia Willett, The Way We Were.
A pregnant single woman travels to Cornwall to stay with a friend whose husband is away at sea.

 

Greece

Alan Furst, Spies of the Balkans.
In 1940, a police official in Salonika helps ferry Jews from Berlin to neutral Turkey.

Victoria Hislop, The Island.
A woman travels to Crete to learn the secrets of her family’s history.

Ioanna Karystiani, The Jasmine Isle.
A woman submits to an arranged marriage but returns from her honeymoon to find that the man she really loves is now married to her sister.

Jeffrey Siger, Murder in Mykonos. Mystery
A police chief transferred from Athens to the island of Mykonos deals with the murders of female tourists.

 

Hungary

Zsuzsa Bank, The Swimmer.
Abandoned by their mother, two children embark on a vagabond existence with their father.

Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge.
In 1937, three Hungarian Jewish brothers embark on separate paths, but their lives change as World War II begins.

 

Iceland

Arnaldur Indridason, Jar City. Mystery
A detective in Iceland investigates the murder of an old man and uncovers dirty secrets in his past.

Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Last Rituals. Mystery
A graduate student who was researching the history of witch hunts in Iceland is murdered.

Christina Sunley, The Tricking of Freya.
A girl learns about her Icelandic heritage from her aunt and later goes there to uncover a family secret.

 

Ireland

Peter Cunningham, The Sea and the Silence.
In 1945, a young woman begins a life on the southeast coast of Ireland with her new husband.

Patricia Falvey, The Yellow House.
In early 20th century Northern Ireland, a young woman dreams of reclaiming the home that her family lost.

Tana French, The Faithful Place.
An Irish teen thinks his girlfriend ran away to England without him, but years later her suitcase is found in an abandoned house.

Declan Hughes, The Wrong Kind of Blood. Mystery
A PI returns to Ireland for his mother’s funeral and is asked by a friend to locate her missing husband.

Brian McGilloway, Borderlands. Mystery
A Garda inspector takes charge when a girl’s body is found on the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland.

Patrick Taylor, An Irish Country Doctor.
In the 1960s, a newly qualified doctor joins a practice in rural Northern Ireland.

William Trevor, Love and Summer.
In the 1950s, an orphan marries the widowed farmer she works for but then falls for a photographer who plans to leave Ireland.

 

Italy

Niccolo Ammaniti, I’m Not Scared.
One hot summer in southern Italy, a boy enters an abandoned farmhouse and discovers a terrible secret.

Andrea Camilleri, The Terra-Cotta Dog. Mystery
A Sicilian cop finds the bodies of two lovers in a cave watched over by a life-sized terra-cotta dog.

Anthony Capella, The Wedding Officer.
During World War II, a British officer is assigned to discourage his fellow soldiers from marrying Italian women.

Anne Fortier, Juliet.
An American travels to Siena in search of her Italian heritage and discovers she is descended from Juliet.

Kristin Harmel, Italian for Beginners.
After her younger sister gets married, a woman who has always played it safe decides to accept an invitation to Italy from an old flame.

Donna Leon, A Question of Belief. Mystery
During a heat wave in Venice, Commissario Guido Brunetti investigates a religious charlatan and a corrupt judge.

Christi Phillips, The Rossetti Letter.
A grad student hopes to prove that a 17th century courtesan helped stop a Spanish plot to overthrow the Venetian Republic.

Salley Vickers, Miss Garnet’s Angel.
An English teacher travels to Venice, where she opens her heart to love and faith for the first time.

 

Malta

Mark Mills, The Information Officer.
While Malta is under siege during World War II, the alliance between the Maltese and the British is threatened by a serial killer on the loose.

 

The Netherlands

A. C. Baantjer, DeKok and the Mask of Death. Mystery
A man claims his missing girlfriend checked into a hospital but staff deny she was ever there.

Chris Ewan, The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam. Mystery
A thief who writes mysteries with a thief-detective is suspected of murdering a client who hired him for a burglary.

Margriet de Moor, The Storm.
Two sisters switch places on a whim and one ends up caught in a catastrophic storm on the Dutch coast.

 

Norway

Karin Fossum, Don’t Look Back. Mystery
Norwegian police investigate the murder of a teenage girl in a small town.

Jo Nesbo, The Redbreast. Mystery
A Norwegian detective tracking a vicious neo-Nazi uncovers a plot reaching back to World War II.

Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses.
A Norwegian widower moves to a remote cabin and recalls a childhood summer of profound changes.

 

Poland

Stefan Chwin, Death in Danzig.
At the end of World War II, a German man remains in Danzig as others flee the Russian army and Poles move back into the city.

Zygmunt Miloszewski, Entanglement. Mystery
A Warsaw prosecutor investigates when a man is killed with a skewer after a group therapy session.

Brigid Pasulka, A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True.
A woman seeks a new life in Krakow, where her grandparents settled after World War II.

 

Portugal

Robert Wilson, A Small Death in Lisbon.
A murder in modern-day Lisbon is paralleled with an SS officer’s dealings during World War II.

 

Russia

David Benioff, City of Thieves.
During the Siege of Leningrad, two prisoners—a Jewish poet and a Russian soldier—are promised freedom if they perform an impossible task.

Sam Eastland, Eye of the Red Tsar.
Stalin releases the Tsar’s personal investigator from a gulag to find out what happened to the Romanovs.

Olga Grushin, The Dream Life of Sukhanov.
A Moscow art critic who received many perks under communism finds his life falling apart after Glasnost.

Daphne Kalotay, Russian Winter.
An elderly woman recalls her past as a star of the Bolshoi Ballet.

Stuart Kaminsky, Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express. Mystery
Inspector Rostnikov is sent on a 6,000-mile train ride to intercept a courier exchanging money for a package somewhere en route.

Andrei Makine, Dreams of My Russian Summers.
A boy in the Soviet Union spends summers at his grandmother's house in Siberia.

R. N. Morris, The Gentle Axe. Mystery
In 19th century St. Petersburg, a peasant and a dwarf are found dead in a park, but a detective thinks it's more complicated than a murder-suicide.

William Ryan, The Holy Thief. Mystery
In 1936, an American nun who may have been involved in smuggling religious icons out of the Soviet Union is found dead in a church.

Tom Rob Smith, Child 44.
A State Security officer under Stalin’s regime is convinced that a serial killer of children is on the loose despite government denials.

 

Spain

C.W. Gortner, The Last Queen.
Juana of Castile finds love in an arranged marriage but is involved in power struggles and accusations of madness once she inherits the Spanish throne.

Roderic Jeffries, Sun, Sea and Murder. Mystery
A Mallorcan detective questions a suspected hit-and-run driver who ends up murdered.

Rebecca Pawel, The Summer Snow. Mystery
In post-Civil War Spain, a Guardia officer goes to Granada at his father’s request after his great-aunt dies in suspicious circumstances.

Robert Wilson, The Blind Man of Seville.
Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón is called out during Seville's Semana Santa festivities to investigate the grisly murder of a prosperous restaurateur.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Shadow of the Wind.
In postwar Barcelona, a boy receives a book from a library of forgotten works and learns that someone is out to destroy every copy.

 

Sweden

Kjell Eriksson, The Princess of Burundi. Mystery
Swedish police investigate the murder of a man who was an expert on tropical fish.

Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Mystery
A journalist and a computer hacker are hired to find out what happened to a young heiress who vanished years ago.

Henning Mankell, Faceless Killers. Mystery
Kurt Wallander deals with anti-immigrant tensions that arise after the murders of a Swedish farm couple.

Katarina Mazetti, Benny and Shrimp.
In northern Sweden, a young widowed librarian and a lonely dairy farmer meet in a graveyard.

Linda Olsson, Astrid and Veronika.
A writer rents a house in a small Swedish town and befriends a reclusive old woman.

Johan Theorin, Echoes from the Dead. Mystery
On the island of Oland, the grandfather of a missing boy who was presumed drowned receives one of his sandals in the mail.

 

Ukraine

Janet Skeslien Charles, Moonlight in Odessa.
An engineer moonlights as an interpreter at an Internet dating service for Western men seeking Ukrainian women.

Irene Zabytko, The Sky Unwashed.
The people of a small village are devastated by the effects of the Chernobyl catastrophe.