A great overview of the recent Scandinavian crime fiction. He covers everything from Sjowall/ Wahloo and Mankell to those more recently (being) translated such as Stefan Mani, Unni Lindell and Camilla Ceder. Politics, sociology and cultural differences get a mention and there are chapters on Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland and Denmark. The final chapter looks t TV and film adaptations focusing on Wallender and Larson, though the excellent Killing gets more than a mention too.

I now have a list of authors I'd like to read! ( )

A great overview of the recent Scandinavian crime fiction. He covers everything from Sjowall/ Wahloo and Mankell to those more recently (being) translated such as Stefan Mani, Unni Lindell and Camilla Ceder. Politics, sociology and cultural differences get a mention and there are chapters on Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland and Denmark. The final chapter looks t TV and film adaptations focusing on Wallender and Larson, though the excellent Killing gets more than a mention too.

I now have a list of authors I'd like to read! ( )

Disappointing. This book reads like a quickly assembled set of transcripts of interviews with various writers, agents, and publishers. I had hoped for some critical examination of this genre; the availability of books in English in the genre is growing very fast, as books written over the past twenty years are translated into English. Something like the surveys written by Julian Symonds and P.D. James would have been very useful, but this book doesn't match up. It does offer information about the lives and times of various authors (as well as extended plot summaries of several books) but doesn't offer much guidance on what's worth reading. ( )