5 Translated Works of Crime Fiction You Should Pick Up
If you’re ready to explore crime fiction beyond English-language bestsellers, translated novels offer fresh settings, unforgettable characters, and gripping mysteries from around the world. From atmospheric thrillers to clever whodunits, these five translated crime novels are well worth adding to your reading list.
Introducing an iconic investigative duo—a hapless detective and his capable cat—in this must-read by one of Japan’s most beloved novelists of crime fiction.
Detective Yoshitaro Katayama is afraid of many things: heights, dark spaces, blood and … women. When a young female student is found murdered, he’s given two choices—review the harrowing crime-scene photographs or head to Hagoromo Women’s College to investigate—and reluctantly opts for the latter.
But the threat escalates with additional murders, and soon Katayama has a different surprise on his hands: a calico cat named Holmes, orphaned when the dean himself falls victim.
Surely that’s the last thing Katayama needs. Until Holmes begins to display some uncanny investigative instincts of her own …
“My name is Juan Planchard. I’m twenty-nine years old, and I have five million dollars in my account. I own a house in Caracas, another in Madrid, and a high-rise apartment in New York. I run a sportsbook at the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas. I share a private jet with a friend’s frontman. And I’m convinced—down to my bones—that every decision I made during the revolution was the right one. My descendants will thank me.”
So begins The Adventures of Juan Planchard, the story of a middle-class nobody turned millionaire by weaponizing the very corruption that swallowed Venezuela. He dines with oligarchs, sleeps with models, and navigates a world where power is the only currency—and morality is a luxury no one can afford.
But in the middle of the chaos, greed, and blood money, Juan falls hard for Scarlet, a sharp, seductive American beauty who just might be his way out—or his ultimate downfall.
“Perfect. . . Like taking a warm bath in the best of the Golden Age.”― Janice Hallett
June, 1960. Rough weather at sea leaves a group of strangers stranded on the idyllic Greek island of Utakos, all guests of the only local hotel. Nothing could prepare them for what happens next: Edith Mander, a quiet British tourist, is found dead inside a beach cabana. What appears at first glance to be a clear suicide reveals possible signs of foul play to Ormond Basil, an out-of-work but still well-known actor who in his glory days portrayed the most celebrated detective of all time. Accustomed to seeing him display Sherlock Holmes’ amazing powers of deduction on the big screen, the other guests believe that the actor is the best equipped to uncover the truth.
But when a second body is discovered, there is not a doubt in Basil’s mind: a murderer walks among them. What’s more, the killer is staging each crime as a performance, leaving complex clues that bear an eerie resemblance to those found in the pages of Conan Doyle stories. This is a criminal who knows every trick in the book and is playing a deadly literary game. As the storm rages, Basil must become the genius detective he has only pretended to be.
This clever, whip-smart, locked-room mystery from internationally bestselling author Arturo Pérez-Reverte is a love letter to golden-age detective novels. The Final Problem delights in exploring the tension between an investigator and his suspects, as well as a writer and his reader, delivering a revelatory twist that will shock even the sharpest of mystery fans.
Mira is a desperate young woman, hired by a wealthy single mother to tutor her lonesome son, Yuchan. But Mira is not who she presents herself to be; she is haunted by the death of her own family and motivated by the dark pulse of vengeance. Yuchan was cruel to Mira’s mother. A kind of cruelty she can’t ever forgive.
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.
Structured around four different letters and journal entries: Mira’s, Jiwon’s reply, Yuchan’s younger brother’s diary entry and, finally, Mira’s own written recollection. Each new section brings us deeper into a web of cruelty, consequence, and closer to the truth.
Alice, a fierce and respected Parisian cop, wakes up on a Central Park bench with no memory of the night before, handcuffed to a complete stranger—a musician named Gabriel. Disoriented, dazed, and with someone else’s blood on her shirt, Alice works furiously to reconnect the dots. She remembers clubbing with her friends the night before on the Champs-Élysées. Gabriel claims he was playing a gig in Dublin. Was she drugged? Kidnapped? Why is the gun in her jacket pocket missing a bullet? And whose blood is on her clothes?
Over the next twenty-four hours, Alice and Gabriel race across New York in search of answers, stumbling upon a startling set of clues that point to a terrible adversary from the past. Alice must finally confront her memories of hunting the serial killer who took everything from her—a man she thought was dead, until now.
From France’s #1 bestselling author, Central Park is a taut and suspenseful thriller that will keep readers riveted until its final shocking twist.
