The Writing in the Water
by John Ajvide Lindqvist; translated by Michael Meigs
The latest novel by Lindqvist, the author of “Let the Right One In,” is both a stylish Scandi-noir mystery and a sly sendup of Swedish publishing. THE WRITING IN THE WATER (Amazon Crossing, 466 pp., paperback, $16.99) stars Julia Malmros, a cop turned novelist who, in a witty inside-baseball touch, has been commissioned to write the next book in the hit series that began with “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” (The series’s real-life author, Stieg Larsson, died in 2004; later sequels have been written by other writers, though not Lindqvist.)
Aided by an eccentric young man named Kim Ribbing, a computer hacker she has enlisted to lend verisimilitude to her book’s technological details and who — as a bonus — is also providing romantic assistance, Julia finds herself investigating an actual crime. A group of people eating lunch have been gunned down by shadowy assassins; one of the victims, a rich businessman, is an old friend of hers. Annoyingly for Julia but amusingly for us, the lead investigator is her mopey ex-husband.
Lindqvist does a fine job narrating the sometimes lurid details with cool Scandinavian straightforwardness. It’s not lost on the reader that the book — the first in a planned trilogy — is a gender-swapped homage to “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” even if the heroine is faltering in her own literary efforts. “We think it’s a really fine novel,” her editor says when she submits her first draft, “but … could it have a different plot?”
The Murder at World’s End
by Ross Montgomery
It’s 1910, and the imminent arrival of Halley’s comet has thrown the world into a tizzy of hysterical conspiracy theories and predictions of doom. At an isolated estate called Tithe Hall, fake science reigns. “Hailstorms as large as boulders will rain down across cities!” shouts the owner, Lord Stockingham-Welt, co-founder of a group called the Cometary Cataclysm Society. “Electrical storms will blind all who set eyes on them!”
“The more he talked, the more … well, stupid it sounded,” thinks the newly hired second footman, Stephen Pike, who narrates much of Montgomery’s delightful THE MURDER AT WORLD’S END (Morrow, 323 pp., $30).
Stockingham-Welt orders the servants to seal the house and lock themselves in their rooms. Alas, he doesn’t live long enough to find out that everyone else survives the night unscathed. The next morning, he’s found dead in his locked study, shot in the eye with a crossbow. Equally dead: all the fish in his fish tank. (This will be significant later.)
Montgomery expertly populates the book with red herrings, snappy dialogue and exciting revelations. The characters include a dodgy German scientist, a passel of greedy relatives, a tiresome child, and the pompous and idiotic Inspector Jarvis. The Inspector’s pronouncements about crime are always dead wrong and , as we learn in the book’s charming acknowledgments section, were originally uttered by Hargrave L. Adam, a writer and ex-police officer at the turn of the 20th century.
The character who shines the brightest is the underappreciated Miss Decima, the dead man’s elderly aunt, who spends the night the comet arrives making scientific calculations outside and the rest of the time book subverting our expectations. She and Stephen make a great team and are set to return in Montgomery’s next book.
The First Time I Saw Him
by Laura Dave
Dave’s previous thriller, “The Last Thing He Told Me,” sold more than 5 million copies, was made into an Apple TV series and spent more than 80 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, which suggests that there’s an eager audience for its sequel. THE FIRST TIME I SAW HIM (Scribner, 270 pp., $29), picks up where its predecessor left off, with Hannah Hall rattled by the sudden appearance of her husband, Owen. Missing for five years, he has managed to sneak in for a cameo before vanishing again.
Readers of the first book will remember that in it, Hannah discovered that Owen is not her husband’s real name, and that he disappeared because his past life — in which he testified against a powerful crime family and then entered the Federal Witness Protection Program — caught up with him.
It seems that Hannah and her 22-year-old stepdaughter, Bailey, are now in mortal danger from that same crime family. She gets a text message: “Get out of the house. Now.”
Their escape plan involves a beautiful secluded estate, a flight to France on a plush private jet with a dining table and a bar, and at least one bodyguard. This is not the worst way to be in mortal danger.
Although we learn a lot more about the criminals who have caused all this trouble, they’re sketchily drawn, more like ideas of people. And Dave’s breathless, present-tense writing style won’t be to everyone’s taste. Still, she provides plenty of twists and emphasizes the love that binds her characters together, even the bad ones. How far will they go to keep their families safe?
Sarah Lyall is a writer at large for The Times, writing news, features and analysis across a wide range of sections.
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