The Wolf and the Watchman by Niklas Natt Och Dag
This book about life in eighteenth-century Stockholm pulls no punches. The smells, the poverty, the constant risk of disease, sudden violence – Niklas Natt Och Dag paints a dark but convincing portrait of life for people hanging on at the bottom of the economic ladder in this society. The unlikely partnership of drunken city watchman Mikel Cardell and tubercular attorney Cecil Winge develops from their shared desire to find out what happened to a strangely mutilated body. If you can imagine The Wire transported to Sweden in 1793, you will have a good sense of the flavor of this book.
Marley by Jon Clinch
I don’t know that Marley officially classifies itself as a mystery, but it should! How did Ebenezer Scrooge become the Scrooge we know from A Christmas Carol, and how did his erstwhile partner Jacob Marley die? The New York Times described the book as “noirish,” and I definitely agree: Victorian noir. While Clinch has an eye for period detail and Dickens references abound, some twists and turns in the plot come from a very modern pair of eyes and the perspective of over a century.
The Paragon Hotel by Lyndsay Faye
Lyndsay Faye set The Paragon Hotel in 1921 Oregon, which means the novel plays out in my favorite era in a place I knew almost nothing about. Mysteries abound: where did Alice James get $50,000 and a bullet wound? Why does Max, a Black Pullman Porter, decide to help Alice by hiding her at the Paragon? And what has happened to Davy Lee, the young mixed-race boy who vanished from an amusement park nearby? Filled with historical detail about the treatment of Black people in Oregon during this period, this book will challenge what you thought you knew about segregation outside of the American South AND keep you guessing all the way to the end.
Liz Helfrich 