European Crime/Mystery Fiction
Explore the best European crime and mystery fiction books. Discover gripping thrillers, detective novels, and suspenseful stories from top authors across Europe.
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Sidetracked
by Henning Mankell
The mystery thriller series that inspired the Netflix crime drama Young Wallander • From the dean of Scandinavian noir, the fifth riveting installment in the internationally bestselling and universally acclaimed Kurt Wallander series. In the award-winning Sidetracked, Kurt Wallander is called to a nearby rapeseed field where a teenage girl has been loitering all day long. He arrives just in time to watch her douse herself in gasoline and set herself aflame. The next day he is called to a beach where Sweden’s former Minister of Justice has been axed to death and scalped. The murder has the obvious markings of a demented serial killer, and Wallander is frantic to find him before he strikes again. But his investigation is beset with a handful of obstacles—a department distracted by the threat of impending cutbacks and the frivolity of World Cup soccer, a tenuous long-distance relationship with a murdered policeman’s widow, and the unshakably haunting preoccupation with the young girl who set herself on fire. Fascinating and astute, Sidetracked is a compelling mystery enhanced by keen social awareness.
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Jar City
by Arnaldur Indridason
Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson investigates the killing of a solitary man, found murdered in his Reykjavik apartment, and discovers that the dead man had been accused but not convicted of a rape forty years earlier.
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Voice of the Violin
by Andrea Camilleri
“You either love Andrea Camilleri or you haven’t read him yet. Each novel in this wholly addictive, entirely magical series, set in Sicily and starring a detective unlike any other in crime fiction, blasts the brain like a shot of pure oxygen. Aglow with local color, packed with flint-dry wit, as fresh and clean as Mediterranean seafood — altogether transporting. Long live Camilleri, and long live Montalbano.” A.J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window Inspector Montalbano, praised as “a delightful creation” (USA Today), has been compared to the legendary detectives of Georges Simenon, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. As the fourth mystery in the internationally bestselling series opens, Montalbano’s gruesome discovery of a lovely, naked young woman suffocated in her bed immediately sets him on a search for her killer. Among the suspects are her aging husband, a famous doctor; a shy admirer, now disappeared; an antiques-dealing lover from Bologna; and the victim’s friend Anna, whose charms Montalbano cannot help but appreciate... But it is a mysterious, reclusive violinist who holds the key to the murder.
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The Death of Achilles
by Boris Akunin
International intrigue, professional rivalry, the criminal underworld of nineteenth-century Moscow, and an irresistible femme fatale: if Erast Fandorin was hoping for a quiet homecoming, he is about to be disappointed. Erast Fandorin returns to Moscow after an absence of six years, only to find himself instantly embroiled in court politics and scandal. His old friend General Sobolev - the famous 'Russian Achilles' - has been found dead in a hotel room, and Fandorin suspects foul play. Using his now-famous powers of detection - powers that belie his twenty-six years - Fandorin embarks on an investigation, during which the political and the personal may become dangerously blurred. With the assistance of some formidable martial arts skills, acquired whilst Fandorin was in Japan, our eccentric and ingenious hero must endeavour to discover not so much whodunit, as why ...
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Don't Look Back
by Karin Fossum
The tranquility of a small, idyllic town is shattered when the body of a teenage girl is found, prompting an investigation by Inspector Sejer that reveals the sinister truth behind the town's quiet faade. Reprint.
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Missing
by Karin Alvtegen
Sibylla Forsenstrom doesn't exist. For 15 years she has been one of the homeless in Stockholm and takes every day as it comes. One night she charms a businessman into paying for her dinner and room. His dead body is discovered the following morning and Sibylla is the prime suspect.
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The Flanders Panel
by Arturo PĂ©rez-Reverte
While restoring a fifteenth-century masterpiece, Julia, a young art expert in Madrid, stumbles upon a real-life mystery as she sets out to find the killer responsible for a five-hundred-year-old murder and becomes the target of modern-day intrigue, betrayal, and death. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.
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The Empire of the Wolves
by Jean-Christophe Grange
Grange's riveting international bestseller rivals literate thrillers such as Martin Cruz Smith's "Gorky Park" and Peter Hoeg's "Smilla's Sense of Snow."
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La hermandad de la Sábana Santa
by Julia Navarro
Un incendio en la catedral de TurĂn, donde se venera la Sábana Santa, envuelve la muerte de un hombre al que habĂan cortado la lengua. Estos son los detonantes de una trepidante investigaciĂłn policial del Departamento del Arte, capitaneado por el detective Marco Valoni. Junto a la perspicaz y atractiva historiadora Sofia Galloni y a una periodista ávida de preguntas, el grupo de Valoni deberá resolver un enigma que arranca de los templarios y llega hasta la actualidad. Una trama que tiene como nexo de uniĂłn a una Ă©lite de hombres de negocios, cultos, refinados y muy poderosos.--Desde la descripciĂłn de la editorial.
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The Golden Section
by Pernille Rygg
Igi is being stalked. In the suburb of Oslo where she lives with her cross-dressing husband and their daughter, someone is spray-painting the walls of the houses. HEITMANN=CHILD KILLER, the graffiti says. Who would think such a thing, and how do they know where she lives? On a bitter winter's evening, Igi attends the opening of the exhibition of an artist whose use of violent pornography has caused great controversy. A video is playing, in which a young man is strangled as part of a sado-masochistic sex game. The video is real, the killing played out live to its unwitting audience, and one of Igi's clients is accused of murder. Igi finds herself trapped in a postmodern nightmare, as she explores the world in which art, sex and violence meet.
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The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
In 1327, finding his sensitive mission at an Italian abbey further complicated by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William of Baskerville turns detective.
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Outsider in Amsterdam
by Janwillem Van de Wetering
When Piet Verboom is found dangling from a beam in the Hindist Society he ran, Detective-Adjutant Grijpstra and Sergeant de Gier of the Amsterdam police are sent to investigate.
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Berlin
by Pierre Frei
Berlin, 1945, American Sector. Ben, 15, aspiring black marketeer, finds the body of a young, blonde, German woman on the line at Uncle Tom's Cabin subway station. She has been sexually abused and strangled with a chain. Inspector Dietrich is quickly brought in, along with his American counterpart in the Military Police, John Ashburner. But as the two detectives set about solving this brutal murder it becomes clear that the case is not isolated, when the bodies of young women are discovered in the French and Russian Sectors of the city. Whilst detectives struggle to understand what links these terrible murders - apart from a shadowy motorcyclist who always seems to be near-at-hand at the time the murders are committed - Berlin itself battles to recover itself from the ashes of the newly lost War that tore the City apart. Witty, daring and subtle, this gripping whodunit will leave the reader gasping.