TOP TEN INTERNATIONAL CRIME NOVELS OF 2013:‘What could be missing in the life of a woman who loves reading detective stories and has a shop specializing in crime fiction that provides her with enough to live on, who lives in a city she adores and has a lover she finds...

‘Argentine novelist Claudia Piñeiro's new book (published by Bitter Lemon Press and translated by Miranda France) shares some common ground with her previously translated All Yours (a death that may be accidental, a feuding couple, their troubled daughter) but A Crack in the Wall is a fuller and more interesting...

‘Starts with “Still Life No 41”, shortlisted for the short story 2012 Edgar Award, in which the young twenty-six year old Director of the Museum of Ultra-Avant-Garde Art is pushed out of her job on the orders of the Minister of Culture. She's naturally outraged. While it's true she only...

‘Early in Solana's haphazardly plotted third novel featuring twin Barcelona detectives Eduard Martínez and Borja Masdéu (after 2011's A Shortcut to Paradise), the pair find their office burglarized and decide to move a meeting with Teresa Solana, an author of noir novels, to an upstairs apartment where Borja is hiding...

'A smart plot, an engagingly acerbic lead, and a nuanced portrayal of 2009 Poland lift Miloszewski’s second mystery featuring Warsaw prosecutor Teodor Szacki (after 2010’s Entanglement). After breaking up a human-trafficking ring in the provincial city of Sandomierz, Szacki decides to move there to begin his life anew, though he’s...

'In 1998 Antwerp, Chief Superintendent Fons "The Sponge" Luyckx, and Detective Inspector Lannoy investigate the disappearance of Shelley "Dixie" Cox whose husband Professor Victor Cox teaches the History of Cinema at the Institute of Film and Theatre Studies. They find her battered body by the Bonaparte Dock. She apparently was...