Anne Zouroudi, The Messenger of Athens, 2007

Set on the fictional Greek island of Thiminos, after just thirty pages this present-day murder mystery involving an illicit love affair becomes quietly compelling, probably because Zouroudi’s attention to the detail of the landscape is what gives this book its delicate atmosphere. Then there are the people, with their everyday Greek tragedies in which superstition and gender roles are entrenched and emotionally suffocating. Zouroudi’s characterisation is also good, particularly in the clear depiction of the mannerisms of the investigator Hermes Diaktoros and how they contrast with his mysterious and unexplained background (he is in fact the book’s biggest mystery), always hinting at a ‘higher power’, which may account for the way he gets people to just open up to him with the truth. At times it feels like this debut novel may be heading into Paulo Coelho territory, but it’s reassuringly far more down to Earth than that. Recommended.  PY

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John Burdett, Bangkok Eight, 2003

Serious novels about modern Bangkok are always worth discovering, and this becomes a must-read given the glowing quotes (Deaver, Ellroy, Hiaasen...) that line all four sides of its front and back covers. John Burdett has gone so far under the skin of the city – and into the Thai mindset – that the rather straightforward whodunnit of a US Marine killed in a car full of snakes ends up playing a definite second string to the Buddhist prerogatives that give this book a unique direction. It is particularly well researched from the bizarre opening murder scene to the strange karmic resolution, and Burdett’s writing throughout is genuinely grown-up, multi-faceted and often darkly comic with an almost science fictional sensibility. There’s also a distinct avoidance of the more predictable clichés when dealing with Bangkok’s sex industry which forms a large part of this story’s background, giving it a level of authenticity than one might not reasonably expect from a farang author. Excellent.  PY

MORE ON JOHN BURDETT : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Michael Chabon, The Final Solution, 2005

In 1944 a silent German boy arrives in Sussex as a refugee, with a talkative African Grey parrot on his shoulder. The parrot goes missing, a murder ensues and a veteran detective comes out of retirement. The influence of Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’ stories is clearly there above and beyond the usual trappings of mystery fiction, and the story also functions as a self-contained microcosm the same way that Agatha Christie’s ‘Miss Marple’ stories do, in that by knowing the ways of her village she knows the ways of the world; similarly, over the years the detective has developed an almost extrasensory intuition about people’s unseen behavioural patterns, and also seems to know what is in the air by the temperament of the bees he keeps. Michael Chabon, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, writes with an extraordinary confidence in his own words that could almost convince you he’d spent time back in that era, and he quickly gets to the weary soul of the elderly detective, necessary for the reader to see how the detective himself gets to the heart of the matter. Impressive.  PY

Marcello Fois, The Advocate, 1998

A young man is convicted in absentia of sheep rustling in a rural Sardinian setting at the turn of the 20th Century, but the legal defender Bustianu suspects this is a smoke screen for a far greater crime if certain people can get away with it. Marcello Fois is onto a winner with the character of Bustianu, a young, introverted and solitary person more at home with the rustic Sardinian landscape than the selfish motives those around him. A straightforward enough mystery, well told at the right length.   PY