Travel the World With These 8 International Crime Fiction Novels

The residents of Dog Island, a small island in the Mediterranean, are used to living apart from the mainland and subsisting on what they can fish and grow themselves. They're private people, which is why they're horrified and scared when three bodies wash up on their beach. If they report the deaths to the mainland, people will come and poke about the business. So they decide to cover up the deaths, only to find their efforts are for naught when a foreign detective arrives and begins asking questions.

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Set in a beautiful seaside town in Sweden, Winter Water is about Martin, a man fascinated by the ocean who leaps at the chance to relocate his young family to a seaside home where he sets up a mussel farm. But things don't go smoothly. Locals disapprove of him, and then one day in January his little boy goes missing. Although his body is never found, evidence suggests that he drowned in the ocean. But then, Martin and police photographer Maya begin digging and they discover that other children have died on this same day, years apart, in the same place. Is something targeting their children? And how do they stop it?

In 1972 Beirut, young Matthew has recently arrived in the city with his American parents. His father works in the foreign service and his mother is a socialite who is popular among ex-pats, and while Matthew largely feels lost and uncertain in an unfamiliar city, he soon begins to pick up on small clues that his parents aren't what they seem. As unrest brews in the city, Matthew must reckon with the fact that his father might be directly involved…and decide his own path forward.

The second in the Baby Ganesh Agency Investigation series, The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown follows Inspector Chopra on a puzzling, high stakes adventure involving a jewel heist. The Koh-i-Noor diamond has been prized and fought over for centuries, so when it goes on display with the British Crown Jewels in Mumbai, it's heavily guarded. Except when Inspector Chopra goes to view it, it's stolen in plain sight, leaving him to wonder who would have the audacity to pull off such a daring heist.

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Set in the dark underbelly of criminal Glasgow, Every Night I Dream of Hell is about Nate Colgan, a criminal who isn't above taking the security job offered to him by Peter Jamieson's organization. But it's not exactly the best time to be joining up. Jamieson is in prison, and when one of his supporters is executed, unease spreads. It's up to Colgan to figure out who the murderer is, and he finds himself racing against a detective inspector who is assigned to the case, chasing down the same leads and suspects—including a woman that Colgan once loved.

When Sandra's journalist husband plunged to his death at a construction site while chasing down a lead, she's convinced it's foul play. The police, on the other hand, rule it an accident. But luckily for Sandra, she's a forensic analyst and has more than a few connections in the investigative world, and she won't be giving up so easily. But as she peels back the layers of her husband's investigation, she finds that a secret society that goes back centuries might be involved, and they won't hesitate to kill again.

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Sergeant Alexandra Cupidi is a transfer from London to Kent, where her urban ways and gruff mannerisms don't go over too well with the locals. But she's determined to do her job, and lately, that means taking a young constable who needs a strong hand under her wing. Then they catch a puzzling case: A woman is found drowned in a local marsh, and when they go to inform her next of kin, the man claims that he never met his biological mother before last night...after her body was already found. Who is this woman, and who is impersonating her?

Set in 1950s Boston, Serpents in the Cold introduces readers to Cal O'Brien and Dante Cooper, two friends and WWII veterans who find themselves intrigued by recent news of a killer on the loose, and Dante especially feels called to action when the killer strikes close to home. Cal works in private security and Dante has ties to the criminal world, so they figure they're just the duo to start investigating where the police cannot. But when their leads take them straight to the top of city government, they realize they're in way over their heads.

When Dr. Philip Taiwo is called on by a powerful Nigerian politician to investigate the public torture and murder of three university students in remote Port Harcourt, he has no idea that he’s about to be enveloped by a perilous case that is far from cold.
Philip is not a detective. He’s an investigative psychologist, an academic more interested in figuring out the why of a crime than actually solving it. But when he steps off the plane and into the dizzying frenzy of the provincial airport, he soon realizes that the murder of the Okriki Three isn’t as straightforward as he thought. With the help of his loyal and streetwise personal driver, Chika, Philip must work against those actively conspiring against him to parse together the truth of what happened to these students.

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