IRRESISTIBLE TARGETS

Tom Kerr is a serial killer. He has been in prison for four years, and could be facing permanent renewals of his original sentence which wou...

Do you remember when Wallander discovered an ATM in the centre square of Ystad, Sweden was about to crash the world economy? Well, Helsin...

It is 1987. Benedikt thinks he is in love, and has driven up with Katla to her parents' cottage up in Iceland's Westfjords. Everyth...

Sometimes it's hard to keep track of where you stand with Sebastian Bergman. Or Rolf Lassgard, who plays Bergman on TV, and who is t...

My copy of the book was sitting in the pile, waiting to be read, and then Henning Mankell died, and I wrote my piece (you can read that ...

Henning Mankell was important as a crime writer because his Wallander books sparked what had become an explosion of Scandinavian crime fict...

Politics often plays a huge part in Swedish thriller writing, but usually it's the politics of the past. Stieg Larsson's trilogy mo...

I haven't yet watched BBC4's broadcasts of the TV adaptation of Arne Dahl's novel, but when I read the book a few months ago I ...

Kurt Wallander is 60 years old. He's living in his isolated house with a view of the sea. He's starting to forget things, including...

John Harvey's police novels have always been built on the characters of his cops, and there is no one better at revealing those characte...

With this novel, Arnaldur Idrisason sends his detective Erlender on leave to pursue his own obsessions in remote eastern Iceland, and leaves...

Deon Meyer's Thirteen Hours has been nominated for the Johannesburg Sunday Times Fiction Prize, which is fascinating, because it's ...

Last week the Guardian devoted an entire page of their Friday review section to Joe Queenan's discovery that Kenneth Branagh was not the...

BBC4 has now reached the halfway point, ten episodes, of the exceptional Danish crime drama The Killing . It follows in the wake of the Scan...

NOTE: IT welcomes the New Year with only its second guest essay. Bob Cornwell wrote a version of what follows as a comment following my resp...

Following from my watching the Swedish TV film version of The Man Who Smiled (you can link to that review here )I've been locked down on...