Ann Cleeves' Top Book Recommendations

Ann Cleeves

Sidetracked has this Kurt Wallander as the central character and he’s the classic miserable cop in the tradition of Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus. It has one of the most brilliant openings. He’s great at setting up stories, it’s always really visual. There’s a young woman running through a field of rape, and you can just imagine this woman and the yellow rape and she sets fire to herself. Kenneth Branagh bought the rights to this series of books and I think he’s filmed three of them. The setting is very important. These ones are set in Sweden, always away from the centre, isolated, in rural settings. One is on a nature reserve, and there’s one in a deserted farm house. You’ve got these small communities where everyone knows each other’s secrets. Mankell has quite an interesting political perspective too. He was quite left-wing and this really comes out in his writing. This one has a plot involving immigration and corrupt politicians. There isn’t a lot of light relief. Very few jokes. He was one of the first Scandinavian writers to be translated into English so he’s the standard – gruesome murders and bleak landscape. [source]

Ann Cleeves

Well, he does but this one, The Mind’s Eye, is much lighter. It’s also Swedish but the central character, another cop, Van Veeteren, is grumpy but has a great sense of humour so the book is full of jokes, one-liners. There is a sense of fun and play in Nesser. This book was the third one of his to be translated into English and although he’s a Swede his books aren’t set in any European country. It’s a fictitious place that’s never named. It’s no specific place and you start off kind of thinking it’s Holland but then it isn’t. This is always the question – where is Nesserland. This one starts with someone stumbling into the bathroom with a very bad hangover and finding his wife dead. He has no memory of attacking her, can’t remember anything. [source]

Ann Cleeves

Fossum is Norwegian and she’s very intense. When you meet her she’s very intense. She writes about these small communities and she writes beautifully, beautiful language and the translation’s really good. She’s good on the rippling out from tragedy. So a child is killed and she writes about the ramifications, the effect on other people in the community. Again she has a male detective who sorts it out. [source]

Ann Cleeves

This is Icelandic and it’s the first in the series. Another miserable cop and the backdrop of Iceland which is bleak and rainy or snowy. The cop has a daughter who’s a junkie and he doesn’t see much of his kids. I chose this one because it could only have been set in Iceland, could only have been about Iceland. The plot is all about the human genome discovery and stuff. I won’t go into it but it has these medical and scientific projects going on and the jars are the test-tubes and jars with parts of the body in them. [source]

Ann Cleeves

This one is so interesting. I judged the International Daggers this year and he was highly commended. It’s his first novel and it’s set on Øland, an island in the Baltic off Sweden. Many years ago a small boy disappeared. He just climbed over his parents’ garden wall and went into the fog. [source]