Our 8 Favorite, New Translated Mysteries & Thrillers
Translation doesn’t just bring us new stories; it drops us into unfamiliar streets, introduces us to detectives shaped by different histories, and reveals the anxieties simmering beneath cultures we may think we understand. These 8 newly translated novels prove that danger, deception, and moral ambiguity are universal — even when the clues are anything but.
And then there is Jiwon, the boy’s mother, a bad mother, Mira thinks—or so Jiwon tells herself she must not be. But as Mira spends more time in the family’s sprawling home, she begins to suspect Yuchan is not the culprit she’s after. Someone else in the family has been pulling the strings. Someone with a deviant plan she can’t begin to imagine.
In an unnamed city in India, a wave of sectarian violence is erupting between Hindus and Muslims, each side viewing the other with suspicion, rage, and blame. As their identities sharpen in this work of political fiction, friends and colleagues turn against each other. Hospital beds fill up and classrooms empty out. Curfews are imposed. Residents flee en masse.Three intellectuals find themselves paralyzed by anxiety and fear. Shruti, a creative writer, spends her time writing and rewriting the same sentence. Hanif is sidelined by his academic department for his secular beliefs. And Sharad finds it increasingly difficult to connect with Hanif, his childhood friend. The only one left to bear witness in this compelling story is the novel’s unnamed narrator, who hurries to transcribe everything that’s happening.
Eleanor lives with prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize a familiar person’s face. It causes stress. Acute anxiety. It can make you question what you think you know. When Eleanor walked in on the scene of her capriciously cruel grandmother, Vivianne’s, murder, she came face to face with the killer-a maddening expression that means nothing to someone like her. With each passing day, the horror of having come so close to a murderer–and not knowing if they’d be back–overtakes both her dreams and her waking moments, thwarting her perception of reality. Then a lawyer calls. Vivianne has left her a house–a looming estate tucked away in the Swedish woods. The place her grandfather died, suddenly. A place that has housed a chilling past for over fifty years.
In the heart of the Parisian summer, a forgotten crime comes to light in this Inspector Maigret tale from Georges Simenon.
On the eve of his death, a condemned man remembers a crime he witnessed years before. With only the name of a bar to direct him, Maigret joins a party of summering revelers who have something to do with the unsolved disappearance–but what, exactly? Descending into the sleazy underside of respectable Parisian life, Maigret investigates and the forgotten crime comes to light.
