Book picks: Acclaimed crime novelist back with bizarre tale

Frozen Tracks
Author: Åke Edwardson
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Price: $16.50 (Paperback)

Acclaimed Swedish detective fiction writer Åke Edwardson returns with Frozen Tracks, his third novel to win the Best Swedish Crime Novel Award from the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy. Frozen Tracks revives Edwardson’s topically named Detective Erik Winter character, who is taxed with connecting two sets of contrasting crimes in the southwestern Swedish city of Gothenburg. By day, a stranger is luring nursery children with candy to his car, before they return, visibly unharmed; while by night, university students are being brutally attacked and left with the same weapon mark. Winter must solve the bizarre trends while trying not to let his own tie to the crimes influence his judgment.

The Heretic Queen
Author: Michelle Moran
Publisher: Crown Publishers
Price: $27.95 (Hardcover)

A palace fire in Ancient Egypt symbolizes the end of an empire and the start of a new one in American author Michelle Moran’s sophomore novel, The Heretic Queen. Nefertari is the only person to survive the blaze that killed the royal family of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The niece of Nefertiti, the former queen, should enjoy a natural progression to power but publicly held opinion about her aunt as a heretic stops the girl in her tracks. When she falls in love with Ramesses II, crown prince of the respected court of Pharaoh Seti I, new and old ways clash as Nefertari struggles to find solace among the public and her peers.

Doors Open
Author: Ian Rankin
Publisher: McArthur & Company
Price: $24.95 (Paperback)

Where idle time meets the urge for a thrill, you’ll find Mike Mackenzie. But instead of taking up a hobby or charity he opts to enter the criminal world to perform art heists, with his eyes particularly set on the National Gallery of Scotland. A career in crime doesn’t seem too daunting at first, as he and two confidants manoeuvre to pillage and subsequently persuade of the crimes’ nonexistence. But inexperienced in the illegal, Mackenzie soon discovers heists can land you in hot water. Doors Open, by acclaimed Scottish writer Ian Rankin, originally appeared in serial publication in the New York Times.