I finished Fred Vargas' Have Mercy On Us All. Good book, gets kind of dark when it goes into the plague spreader's reasons but the melange of backstories and damaged characters makes a pretty, tangled mess. I'll have to continue reading the series.
I also read Ice Moon by Jan Costin Wagner. Wagner is German married to a Finnish woman so the story is set in Finland with one character from Germany. This book was eh. The main detective's wife dies of a long illness in the beginning of the book and this colors his perceptions of the investigation into a series of deaths by smothering. We get chapters from the serial killers perspective which seem to consist entirely of single sentences as paragraphs. There's a number of chapters from the POV of one of the victim's summer flings who flies to Finland when he learns that she's dead and he inherited her apartment. The woman is portrayed as energetic, special, happy, and bright but her focus on some guy she met years ago and never saw or heard from again is just a tad creepy. The one thing I found interesting was how surprised other people were at how easily she talks to strangers. I think this might be a cultural thing because striking up conversations with people you don't know is practically taught from birth here. Also, the main character muses a couple times about how one of his colleagues is so cheerful he's hard to take seriously because upbeat people are seen as superficial and stupid. Apparently smiling = dumb and frowning/neutral = serious. It's a decent, short read but it's kind of repetitive.
I also read The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney, a first novel by a screenwriter. It takes place in 1867 in the Northwest territory. A man is murdered and a woman's teenage son goes missing and a whole bunch of people stomp off into the wilderness to go find him. The writing is generally good though she has a bit of trouble with tenses changing not just in the middle of paragraphs but also in the middle of sentences. She also seems to forget that we can't see who's talking or what facial expressions they're making. There are too many characters. Line, the Norwegian woman who runs from the religious community that took her in, is entirely without purpose. One of the main characters, Daniel Moody, basically does absolutely nothing and people just generally seem to have a 21st century mindset, especially about religion. Basically none of the plot points are resolved and a seemingly important thread about a bone tablet goes absolutely no where. However, the writing was atmospheric and descriptive and the main character, Mrs. Ross, was sympathetic and strong so it was a pretty good read despite the problems.
I'm about to finish A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers which is absorbing and obnoxious by turns. More on that later.
