Some International Spice for Your Holidays

For the Philadelphia Inquirer, Peter Rozovsky offered up his listing of the best international crime fiction for 2008:  

• Canada: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, by John McFetridge
• England: Second Violin, by John Lawton 
• Iceland: The Draining Lake, by Arnaldur Indriðason 
• Ireland: The Big O, by Declan Burke; Yours Confidentially, by Garbhan Downey 
• Italy: Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, by Amara Lakhous, "a great little novel that made book critic Carlin Romano wonder: "Do we have an Italian Camus on our hands?"
• Switzerland: The Chinaman, by Friedrich Glauser 

The Times Online reviewed several "exotic detectives": 

• Arctic Chill, by Arnaldur Indridason (with Icelandic Inspector Erlendur)
• The Pyramid, by Henning Mankell (a collection of Swedish Inspector Wallander stories)
• The Slaughter Pavillion, by Catherine Sampson (featuring Beijing private eye, a former cop called Song)
• The Maze of Cadiz, Aly Monroe (featuring British spy, Peter Cotton, sent to Franco’s Spain)
• Blood Wedding, by the husband-and-wife team who use the pen name PJ Brooke (Set in Granada and the Sierra Nevadas and centered on Sub-inspector Max Romero)
• The Mind's Eye, by Hakan Nesser (with Swedish Inspector Van Veeteren)
• A Not So Perfect Crime by Catalan novelist Teresa Solana.

And the International Noir Fiction blog takes a look at Swedish author Johan Theorin's debut novel, Echoes from the Dead.