Audible’s and Amazon’s efforts to find new ways to maintain their market dominance in the audiobook and ebook markets have had the counter-intuitive consequence of making more books available to subscribers for free via the Audible Plus Catalogue and Amazon First Reads ebooks I’ve been looking at what’s on offer and I think I’ve found some books that I’ll enjoy.
This week I’m reading three of them. They’re all first-in-a-series crime novels One is set in Minnesota and North Dakota in the US, one is set in a small town in the north of Sweden and one is set in Marlborough Sound at the northern tip of New Zealand’s South Island. They’re all about small communities that aren’t in the mainstream of their own countries.
Two are audiobooks that have been around since 2017 and which are the first books in series that are still running. One is the start of a series that has just been translated into English and will be released as an ebook next month by Thomas & Mercer, Amazon Publishing’s mystery, thriller and true crime imprint.
These books will take me around the world. I’m hoping that they’re each going to take me to places and introduce me to people who are outside my own experience and that they’ll make me want to read more books in the series that they kick-off.
‘Murder On The Red River‘ by Marcie R. Rendon (2017)
Three things about this debut novel called to me: it gives me a different view of America, it’s set in a part of the US that I’ve never visited, it’s written by a politically active woman who was in her fifties before she published her first novel and so is likely to have something to say that made her write it.
I’m hoping for a good mystery with a strong sense of place and complex protagonists.
Marcie R. Rendon is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, author, playwright, poet, and freelance writer. Also a community arts activist, Rendon supports other native artists / writers / creators to pursue their art, and is a speaker for colleges and community groups on Native issues, leadership, writing.
In addition to writing stories for adults, she also composes children’s books. The nonfiction books that she has written include MN Historical Press’s Pow Wow Summer as well as CarolRhoda’s Farmer’s Market. She also has had several of her plays published. She was the creative force behind the Raving Native Theater. This would produce the play Bring the Children Home in 2015 to 2016 at four different venues.
She published her first novel, Murder On The Red River, in 2017. This was the first novel in her three-book Cash Blackbear mystery series. Murder On The Red River won the Pinkley Prize for Debut Crime Novell in 2018 and was a finalist for the category of best contemporary novel with ‘Western Writers of American SPUR’.
‘The Snow Angel‘ by Anki Edvinsson (2023)
Scandi-noir books are hit-or-miss for me. There are so many now that some of them feel like they’re written to a formula that an AI could master. The ones I like best are the ones that aren’t trying to be Scandi-noir, the ones that are written for a domestic Swedish or Norwegian audience who will take the context for granted and who will need to be enticed by strong plots and engaging characters.
I’m hoping that The Snow Angel is that kind of book It’s set in the town the author lives in and, although the first book in the series has only just been translated into English, the first three books in the Charlotte von Klint series have been well received in Sweden.
Anki Edvinsson is well known in Sweden for her former career on television, where she worked as a TV host, journalist, and weather forecaster. Edvinsson more or less grew up at a police station, spending her time with her father and his police colleagues.
She moved from Stockholm to Umeå in the north of Sweden, where her husband grew up, where she joined the local news team and also signed up for a writing course, with the intention of writing crime novels set in her second hometown, Umeå.
She is the author of a crime series featuring investigator Charlotte von Klint and her colleagues at the police station in the town of Umeå. An English language translation of the first book, The Snow Angel, was published in 2023. The second book The Mermaid, will be published in English in 2024.
‘Marlborough Man’ by Alan Carter (2017)
I realised recently that while I have more than twenty Australian crime/thriller novels on my shelves, the only New Zealand offering I have is Paul Cleave’s Cemetry Lake (2008) which I haven’t gotten to yet. So I’ve been using the Ngaio Marsh Awards to find the best New Zealand crime writers. Alan Carter won the Ngiao Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel for Marlborough Man in 2018, so, when the title came up in the Audible Plus catalogue, I decided to try it.
Alan Carter is a crime author and sometimes television documentary director. Between 2011 and 2022 he published seven novels. His first book, Prime Cut which kicked off his Cato Kwong series, won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction (2011). His first novel set in New Zealand Marlborough Man, won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel (2018).
Alan was born in Sunderland, UK and immigrated to Australia in 1991. These days he divides his time between his house near the beach in Fremantle and a hobby farm in a remote, rugged valley at the top of New Zealand’s South Island.
Mike Finn's Fiction 