International Mysteries

The first volume in Burdett's quartet about municipal detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep is a trippy, tragi-comic ride, as chilly and caffeinated as a Thai iced tea. Sonchai is a mess of contradictions: a half-farang (white) devout Buddhist who was raised by a prostitute mother; the only honest cop left in Bangkok, and yet still very much in the thrall of his crooked boss; a stoner with a precise eye for detail. Burdett takes... full advantage of his tropical, gritty setting. Sonchai's meals, motorbike rides and hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold pals are so richly and wittily written that by the time our hero's solved his crime you'll feel as if you've spent a lost weekend in the Far East.

McCall Smith's novels have become something of a cottage industry (there are 10 available on eMusic), complete with an HBO show starring Jill Scott as Precious Ramotswe, the series' crime-busting heroine. The only female private detective in Botswana, Ramotswe is both proud and precise. Not content to merely solve crimes, she also must restore the honor of clients. Though sometimes the writing can tread a fine line between folksy and hokey, Ramotswe... is an everywoman with spirit and common sense. Less bloody than the other books on our list, No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency would also be fun for a family road trip.

For those of us who have followed Kurt Wallander, Sweden's most morosely optimistic detective, from the start of his career as an intrigue-busting, assassin hunting, slightly alcoholic mid-size town detective, the final novel in the series is a fitting sendoff. Wallander is now a loving grandfather with a dog and house in the country. However, just as he seems to find his own Ingmar Bergman-esque version of peace (depressive, but the summers... are beautiful), his new son-in-law's father disappears. Of course, Wallander must search for the titular troubled man. As he does, he discovers perhaps his own life will not end so peacefully after all.

Dublin is one of the great literary cities, so it is surprising that relatively few mystery writers have chosen it as their setting. But the city's famed class conflicts, labyrinthine streets and verdant vegetation make the perfect backdrop for crime. The Likeness' plot is surreal: Detective Cassie Maddox happens to look exactly like the victim Detective Rob Ryan is investigating. Worse yet, the former friends have been estranged since they solved a... brutal child murder (the subject of French's first novel, Into the Woods). As Cassie goes undercover as the dead girl, Rob must confront his habit of isolating the women he cares about most. Both characters are Wire-style urban officers, but The Likeness reads more like literary fiction than a straight up police procedural.

It's hard to decide what's more fun in Some Lie and Some Die, Ruth Rendell's 1973 tale of murder at a British rock festival: Inspector Reginald Wexford's overwrought suspicion of hippies, or the strangely charismatic flower child singer Zeno's power over his fellow counterculture-ites. When the body of a brutally murdered young woman turns up on the outskirts of the festival site, a generational clash ensues. Who is to blame for this... crime? The scary hippies, or the squares whose carefully trimmed shrubbery hides all sorts of nasty secrets? Wexford is the quintessential British country detective: irascible, fond of a pint with lunch, gardening, and his wife's shepherd's pie. There have been 23 Wexford novels so far, and Rendell shows no sign of slowing down.

Twelve-year-old Harriet Dufresnes is about to have an intense summer. Obsessed with her brother's unsolved murder (she was an infant when he died), Harriet decides to find his killer. Tartt's setting is small-town Mississippi in the 1970s, in a big old house filled with Harriet's maternal aunts and grandmother. As Harriet's search intensifies, The Little Friend's plot darkens and twists. By the end of the novel, it's hard to decide if Tartt... has written a straight up Southern gothic, potboiler mystery, or a demented takeoff on To Kill A Mockingbird. Amazingly, it works as all three.