Reading in Reykjavík

Title: Katapult Series detective: Kat Colorado No. in series: 2 Year of publication: 1990 Type of mystery: Murder Type of investigator: Private investigator Setting & time: Sacramento, California, USA; late 20th century Story: Private investigator Kat Colorado is upset and angry when John, her friend and cousin by informal adoption, is found murdered. Their grandmother (John’s real and Kat’s informally adopted gran) sends Kat on a quest to find John’s killer and discover the whereabouts of his sister, who has been missing for 4 years. Kat is soon in over her head, dealing with determined criminals who will stop at nothing to stay out of jail. There is also a family drama brewing and a young streetwalker who needs to be rescued. Review and verdict: Kat Colorado is a typical hard-boiled female PI with a nose for trouble, a heart of gold and a troubled past that she wears like a medal. Unlike Jill Smith in Susan Dunlap books that I reviewed earlier, she is an almost instantly l...

I’m in a reading rut. After my reading marathon in September I first did not pick up a book for 2 weeks, then went into a rereading cycle which is what I do to jump start myself when I temporarily lose interest in reading, and now I have fallen into an old familiar rut where I start reading one book after another but after the first session I don’t feel like reading any more of the book, put it down somewhere and start reading another book. And another. And another. It’s pathetic, but I can’t help it. In addition to the usual half-dozen or so books I am reading page-by-page or chapter-by-chapter over a long time (3 years in one case, and I’m only halfway through), I have several of these start-stop books scattered around. The book that started the rut, Clive Barker’s Abarat , I put down when I discovered halfway through that it was the first episode in a 5 book series, the last of which is still being written. I think I will shelve it and not read it until the last book is published an...

I Wordled this blog, and this was the outcome: Click on the image to see the large version.

The first book in this Swedish series, The Ice Princess , was published in English earlier this year, and according to Amazon.co.uk, this one will be published (in hardcover) in February 2009, under the title The Preacher . Icelandic title: Prédikarinn Original Swedish title: Predikanten Series detective: Patrik Hedström (assisted by his colleagues and his girlfriend, writer Erica Falck) No. in series: 2 Year of publication: 2003 Type of mystery: Murder Type of investigator: Police Setting & time: Fjällbacka, Sweden, contemporary Story: The corpse of a young woman is found in a ravine in the small Swedish town of Fjällbacka and beneath the body lie two skeletons of young women who had disappeared more than 2 decades earlier. All three had been tortured in similar ways before dying of strangulation, so everything points to the same killer. Patrik Hedström of the local police heads the investigation while his heavily pregnant girlfriend deals with invasions of visitors seeki...