In Reference to Murder

Mystery Melange

Recycled book sculpture by Long Bin Chen

The Crime Writers of Canada announced the shortlists for the 2014 Arthur Ellis Award, which honor excellence in Canadian crime writing. The winners will be handed out at the Arthur Ellis Gala in Toronto on June 5.

Finalists have been named for this year's CrimeFest Awards in three categories: best crime audiobook, best crime fiction e-book published in both physical and digital format, and best humorous crime novel. Winners will be announced at a gala dinner during the conference May 17 in Bristol, U.K.

Seattle author Mike Lawson won his second straight Spotted Owl Award, given by the Friends of Mystery for the best mystery novel by a Northwest author. Lawson won for his novel House Odds, while Ingrid Thoft won the debut award for her novel Loyalty. For all the finalists, click here.

Earlier this month, RT Book Reviews announced the winners of the 2013 RT Reviewers' Choice Awards in many categories, including various mystery, suspense, and thrillers. In addition, Lee Child and Suzanne Brockmann were honored with a Career Achievement Awards for their body of work. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

Thanks to Elizabeth Foxwell for noting the latest recipient of the George N. Dove Award of the Popular Culture Association's Detective/Mystery Caucus is Christine Jackson. The award honors the serious study of mystery and crime fiction such as Jackson's publication "The Tell-Tale Art: Poe in Modern Popular Culture."

Suspense Magazine's April/May issue includes interviews with Alex Berenson, Barry Eisler, Jennifer McMahon, Matthew Iden, and Gigi Pandian. There's also a new section called "From Across the Pond," with an introduction to authors from Europe including the first profile, author Chris Simms. Plus, the winners of the Terri Ann Armstrong Short Story contest are announced, with the top stories also published in the issue.

Amazon via Omnivoracious posted a list of "100 Mysteries & Thrillers to Read in a Lifetime." This is the latest in a long line of "you must read these" lists, but even if you don't agree with the choices the list creators come up with, there are often some new books and/or authors to give a look.

This week's crime poem over at the 5-2 is "Trickster Time" by Linda Rodriguez, while this week's noir story at Beat to a Pulp is "Tongue Wagging" by Natasha Leullier.

The Q&A roundup includes Billy Kring and Christopher Irvin taking a stab at the Mystery People; and Matthew Louis takes the "Short, Sharp Interivew" challenge from Paul D. Brazill.

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Warner Bros has acquired the Joel Dicker novel The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair as a vehicle for Ron Howard to direct. The story follows a young superstar novelist who becomes involved in a sensationalized murder mystery when a missing 15-year-old girl turns up dead in the backyard of the novelist's mentor.

Actor Jackie Earle Haley will take on directing duties for the indie crime drama Criminal Activities. The project stars John Travolta, Michael Pitt, Dan Stevens and Rebecca Da Costa and follows four young guys who invest in an insider-trading deal that goes south, although that isn't the worst of their troubles: one of them borrowed his share of the money from a mobster.

British actor Tom Hardy will play twin brothers Ronnie and Reggie in the new film Legend about East End gangsters, from LA Confidential screenwriter Brian Helgeland. Meanwhile, Emily Browning is in talks to join Hardy, playing a woman who marries one of the gangster brothers in hopes of changing his criminal ways.

Scott Speedman has signed on to star opposite Patricia Clarkson in October Gale, the drama written and directed by Ruba Nadda. Speedman will play a mysterious man who washes up on the shore of a recently widowed doctor's remote island cottage, unconscious and bleeding from a gunshot wound--and then the shooter comes to finish the job during a storm that cut the island off from the mainland.

Company Pictures acquired a TV option for AK Benedict’s The Beauty of Murder, a debut novel that alternates between present day Cambridge and the 17th century as it follows a time-travelling serial killer.

In another book-option deal, UK-based producers Piers Tempest and Jo Bamford bought film rights to Chris Kuzneski’s The Hunters, the first book in a series of the same name. The storyline follows ex-soldier Jack Cobb and his treasure hunting team as they attempt to find a Romanian train filled with riches that disappeared in Russia during the First World War.

Actor Mark Strong (Sherlock) has signed a deal to play a black ops agent opposite Sacha Baron Cohen's unhinged ruffian brother in Grimbsy.

Chace Crawford, Eliza Dushku, Brandon T. Jackson and PJ Byrne will start production May 5 on Eloise, the psychological thriller directed by Robert Legato from a script by Chris Borrelli (Vatican Tapes). The story follows four friends who break into an abandoned asylum in hopes of finding a death certificate, only to instead find the institution harbors a horrifying history and the truth about their own tragic pasts.

An official trailer was released for Cold in July, based on Joe R. Lansdale's book. The movie stars Michael C. Hall (Dexter), Sam Shepard and Don Johnson and has a release date in theaters and via video on demand May 23. Hall stars as a small-town guy hailed as a hero after he kills a burglar, but then the crook’s vengeful ex-con dad (Sam Shepard) shows up and threatens the hero’s family.

New stills from director Justin Kurzel's film adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth were published by the Daily Mail, which also featured an interview with the director. The project stars Michael Fassbender (12 Years a Slave) and Marion Cotillard and has a U.K. release in early 2015.

A new extended TV spot was released for Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, starring Mickey Rourke, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Josh Brolin.

TELEVISION

Amazon Prime secured exclusive rights for select HBO programming, including The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and The Wire, beginning May 21. In addition, the shows will be available on Amazon's fledgling Fire TV media player by the end of the year.

BBC One is airing the new six-part drama Happy Valley, written by Sally Wainwright and starring Sarah Lancashire as police sergeant Catherine Cawood.

The Beeb also secured the rights to two recent novels by Irish author Claire McGowan, The Lost and The Dead Ground, featureing forensic psychologist Paula Maguire.

Omnimystery News reported that A&E announced the third season of Longmire, based on a character created by Craig Johnson and played by Robert Taylor, will premiere on June 2nd.  

Netflix has set August 1 for the premiere of the six-episode final season of The Killing, starring Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman, and also released a teaser trailer.

USA Network is also looking ahead to summer, announcing the return dates for its series Suits, Graceland, Royal Pains, and Covert Affairs.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

The latest Penguin Podcast features a round up of crime fiction interviews, excerpts, and readings (hat tip to Ayo Onatade via Shotsmag).

Ian Rankin appeared on the TM Live Book Show, hosted by Michele Magwood.

Quote of the Day

FFB: Twelve Women Detective Stories

Oxford University Press put out a series of "twelve" anthologies in the 1990s, including Twelve American Detective Stories (1997), Twelve English Detective Stories (1998), and Twelve American Crime Stories (1998). The only one devoted to female protagonists is Twelve Women Detective Stories, also published in 1988, and edited by Laura Marcus (of Birkbeck College, London), with assistance from Chris Willis. Interestingly, over half of the writers were male and date from the late 19th to early 20th centuries when women detectives came into fashion. The heroines in these stories range from a housekeeper to a secretary, and a pawn-broker in a seedy area of Victorian London to Lady Molly Robertson-Kirk of Scotland Yard.

Arranged in roughly chronological order, the stories included are

• W. S. Hayward's "The Mysterious Countess" (1864)
• Catherine Louisa Pirkis's "Drawn Daggers" (1893)
• Fergus Hume's "The First Customer and The Florentine Dante" (1897)
• Grant Allen's "The Adventure of the Cantankerous Old Lady" (1898)
• L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace's "Mr. Bovey's Unexpected Will" (1899)
• Baroness Orczy's "The Man in the Inverness Cape" (1910)
• Hugh C. Weir's "The Man with Nine Lives" (1914)
• Anna Katherine Greene's "An Intangible Clue" (1915)
• Arthur B. Reeve's "The Clairvoyants" (1916)
• F. Tennyson Jesse's "Lot's Wife" (1931)
• Gladys Mitchell's "A Light on Murder" (1950)
• Henry Cecil's "On Principle" (1948)

Many of these authors are unfamiliar to the average reader (and a few even to me), so this volume serves also as an introduction to their writing. As with all anthologies, the quality of the stories varies quite a bit, with the better stories toward the latter part of the book, including Baroness Orczy's "The Man in the Inverness Cape" (with Lady Molly of the Yard); F. Tennyson Jesse's "Lot's Wife," where her Frenchwoman detective Solange (who has psychic powers that enables her to sense evil) becomes entranced with another woman's beauty; Hugh C. Weir's "The Man with Nine Lives" about a poor devil who has survived eight attempts on his life until famous detective Madelyn Mack discovers there's more to his story than meets the eye; and Henry Cecil’s amusingly cynical "On Principle."

Other female-themed anthologies have superceded this one in quality and scope. But this is still an entertaining read and a good, if limited, overview to the types and styles of female protagonists penned before and during the two world wars.

'Zine Scene

The latest All Due Respect (Issue 2) is out, with a special look at thriller author Owen Laukkanen, whose latest book, Kill Fee, was published in March. Laukkanen is interviewed by Chris F. Holm and offers up a non-fiction piece about his days on the seas and a story about deep sea fishing. There's also some "seriously dark fiction" from CS DeWildt, David Siddall, Joseph Rubas, Eric Beetner, Liam Sweeny, and Scott Adlerberg. And editor Chris Rhatigan continues his quest to review every Hard Case Crime book. You can grab your copy at Amazon or Amazon UK.

The spring 2014 issue of the excellent crime fiction magazine Needle has also just been released, with original stories from Patti Abbott, Jen Conley, Heath Lowrance, Stephen D. Rogers, Sandra Seamans and more.

Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine is already preparing its June issue to ship. From the blurb: Buried secrets have a way of working their way into the light, sometimes explosively. They may gnaw at psyches, as in Shelley Costa’s "The Specific Gravity of Blood in Sunlight" or Steve Lindley’s "Man Buries Man." There are also new stories from Neil Schofield, John C. Boland, Kevin Egan, Meredith Anthony, Jim Fusilli, Sarah Weinman, and a Mystery Classic by Nedra Tyre.

Likewise, AHMM's sister 'zine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine has another great lineup for June, with a look at book awards season and new fiction from previous Readers Award winners Dave Zeltserman, with a new case featuring Julius Katz and Archie ("Julius Accused"), and British author Marilyn Todd, with a new story in her Claudia Seferius series ("Bad Taste"). Plus, there are eight other fine shorts from the likes of Bill Pronzini, Robert Lopresti and more.

Mystery Melange

Dragon book sculpture

I missed the announcement earlier this month of the Grand Prix du Roman Noir being bestowed on hard-boiled author Martyn Waites for his novel Born Under Punches (Mysterious Press). The nod for best French crime novel went to Yves Ravey for Un Notaire Peu Ordinaire. The awards are handed out annually at the Festival International du Film Policier de Beaune. For all the nominees, click here.

The finalists for the 2014 Bony Blithe Award (which celebrates traditional Canadian mysteries) include Thread and Buried by Janet Bolin; Gold Web by Vicki Delany; Never Laugh as a Hearse Goes By by Elizabeth J. Duncan; Miss Montreal by Howard Shrier; and Framed for Murder by Cathy Spencer. The winner will be announced at this year's Bloody Words conference in Toronto, June 6th through 8th.

Deadly Pleasure Magazine announced its nominees for the annual Barry Awards. Best novel contenders include A Conspiracy of Faith by Jussi Adler-Olsen; Tap on the Window by Linwood Barclay; Sandrine's Case by Thomas H. Cook; Suspect by Robert Crais; Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger; and Standing in Another Man's Grave by Ian Rankin. (Hat tip to Janet Rudolph at Mystery Fanfare.)

A new exhibition on Sherlock Holmes is coming to the Museum of London from October of this year to April 2015. The exhibition looks at why Sherlock Holmes conjures up such enduring fascination and how the character has transcended literature onto stage and screen and continues to attract huge audiences to this day.

Speaking of Sherlock, The Guardian's newspaper readers said Sherlock Holmes is the perfect way to get back into the reading habit. But how does his appearance on the page compare to his screen incarnations?

Bookstores are having to adapt quickly to survive in the lightning-fast changes that are taking place in the publishing world. Salon noted an American Booksellers Association report that the number of indie bookstores in the U.S. has grown 19.3 percent since 2009, adding that "There is increasing evidence that the same digital transformation that has so dramatically reshaped the publishing industry, and driven millions of consumers online, also paradoxically rewards locally rooted authenticity."

Criminal Element is offtering up the chance to win a half-dozen books from Hilary Davidson, John Sandford, and more. The entry deadline is May 6.

Elizabeth Foxwell noted some new music releases of film scores for movies such as Young Sherlock Holmes and 1945's The Man in Half Moon Street.

The featured poem at the 5-2 this week is "Marine Barracks First Aid" by David S. Pointer, and the noir of the week at Beat to a Pulp is "Partners in Crime" by Andy Henion.

The Q&A roundup is a feast of author interviews, including: Christa Faust, who chats with Vince Keenan; J.A. Jance, who is interrogated by the Mystery People; the very same Mystery People grilled Hilary Davidson on her new standalone thriller; Janet Evanovich drops by Writers Who Kill; Alan Bradley, creator of the Flavia de Luce series, was interviewed by Squiddo Magazine; and Jo Nesbø caught up to The Mystery People.

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Leonardo DiCaprio has signed to star in the film adaptation of Michael Punke's novel The Revenant: A Novel Of Revenge. The gritty thriller focuses on a 19th century fur trapper who survives getting mauled by a grizzly bear, and then plans revenge on cohorts who robbed him and left him for dead. 

The film based on Laura Lippman's novel Every Secret Thing is being shown as part of the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan from April 16-27. For screening times, check out the film festival's website.

The Pierce Brosnan-starring spy thriller November Man, based on the late Bill Granger’s 1987 novel, There Are No Spies, has been given a U.S. release date of August 27. Brosnan plays an ex-CIA operative brought out of retirement to track down his former pupil (Luke Bracey) in a plot involving the Russian president-elect and high-level CIA officers.

Directory Jerry Bruckheimer indicated they were in the process of getting the script for the Beverly Hills Cop sequel finished, with the hopes to start shooting at the end of the summer or in early fall. Star Eddie Murphy has signed on to rejoin the franchise.

After just three weeks' efforts, Gosnell has become the most funded movie ever on Indiegogo. The project centers on the real-life story of Philadelphia doctor Dr. Kermit Gosnell, who ran "the abortion clinic from hell" and was convicted on three counts of first-degree murder. 

The first trailer was released for Gone Girl, the film adaptation of Gillian Flynn's bestselling novel. The project stars Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry, Missi Pyle and Patrick Fugit and is directed by David Fincher.

A trailer was also released for God's Pocket, the feature-length directorial debut from Mad Men star John Slattery that's based on the novel of the same name by Pete Dexter. The film stars the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman and is set in a gritty blue-collar neighborhood where a construction "accident" leads to the burial of a body and the truth.

Want more trailers? The latest trailer for David Michod's gritty crime thriller The Rover, promises that "things fall apart" in a post-apocalyptic society where normal rules of civilization have faded.

Meanwhile, Magnolia Pictures released a teaser poster and a trailer for the conspiracy thriller Pioneer.  (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

TELEVISION

FX renewed its 1980s spy drama The Americans, starring Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, for a third season of 13 new episodes.

A&E Network gave the go-ahead to the unscripted series D.O.A. from Law & Order executive producer Dick Wolf. The series follows an elite team of detectives who re-examine controversial murder cases "in which unresolved questions linger long after the verdict."

X Files producer/writer Frank Spotnitz and Nicholas Meyer (Houdini) have created the crime series Freud: The Secret Casebook, a period drama where Sigmund Freud becomes the world's first criminal profiler.

Law & Order: SVU will welcome back B.D. Wong, who starred on the NBC drama for nine seasons, to reprise his role as Dr. George Huang in the season's penultimate episode.

Omnimystery News reported that of the final five episodes of Agatha Christie's Poirot series, three will be available exclusively on Acorn TV, while only two will air on PBS. Acorn will, however, make these three episodes available to PBS later in the year.

The fledgling network Pivot announced a new programming slate, incuding the dark drama Fortitude that follows the residents of an Arctic town shaken to its core by the brutal murder of a research scientist.

ABC Family released a first look at stars Tori Spelling and Jennie Garth who will play amateur detectives in the half-hour comedy-drama Mystery Girls.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

This week on CBS This Morning: David Baldacci, author of The Target.

This week on Crime and Science Radio: When Disaster Hits: Naming The Dead, an Interview With NTSB’s Paul Sledzik.

NPR's Fresh Air program profiled author crime writer Giorgio Scerbanenco, often called "the father of Italian noir."

Black Mask magazine was founded ninety-four years ago, in April of 1920. To celebrate, Open Road Media put together a YouTube video hosted by Otto Penzler, who discusses the history of the magazine where mystery greats including Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Carroll John Daly got their start.

Quote of the Day

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - Post-Downtime Edition

First of all, I must apologize for the lateness of this post - Typepad (who hosts this blog) had a major denial of service attack overnight and just now was able to fix it.

The very talented author/blogger Patti Abbott is taking today off from hosting the weekly Friday's "Forgotten" Books feature, so I am collecting the links in her absence. Scroll down the page for all the FFB goodness. If there are any errors or omissions, please let me know via the comments or [email protected].

First off, though, my own contribution this week:  A Different Kind of Summer by Gwendoline Butler (after a few 80-degree days being followed by this week's freezing temps, I'm ready for any kind of summer...).

 

Gwendoline Butler (b. 1922) had limited success as a writer before she began a police procedural series featuring a young Scotland Yard Inspector, John Coffin, penning eight Coffin novels between 1956 and 1962. When Butler's husband took a job teaching in St. Andrews, Scotland, the author decided she wanted a change from Coffin and found her inspiration one day when she saw a young red-haired Scottish policewoman. She later asked the local police chief about the young officer and was told she was a recent graduate on a rapid promotion track. Thus was born the character of Detective Charmian Daniels of the fictional Deerham Hill CID and, as some have given credit to the author (written under her pen name of Jennie Melville), the birth also of the woman's police procedural.

Melville also dipped her pen into the romantic suspense well for a time, evening receiving a Romantic Novelists Association Major Award in 1981, but eventually returned to both Inspector Coffin and Detective Daniels. She went on to write over 70 novels and was a recipient of the Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger in 1973 and shortlisted for the Golden Dagger for another novel.

One critic elevated Melville/Butler to a status equal to the Four Great Founding Mothers: Christie, Sayers, Allingham and Marsh, not only due to their writing, but in light of how many other elements they had in common: all well-educated (Butler lectured at Oxford), all prolific writers, all wrote on subjects other than detective fiction, and four of the group had supportive husbands. If she is not as well remembered as the others, it may be due to the fact that writers who she helped paved the way for, such as P.D. James and Ruth Rendell, eventually eclipsed her in acclaim.

Melville's writing of her female detective, Charmian Daniels, shows elements of early feminism and as the character grew through the years, Detective Daniels also reflected the changing roles of women and attitudes toward them, particularly in a traditional man's field, law enforcement. Daniels grows in her career through time and is eventually promoted to Chief Superintendent with a move to Windsor. In an interview with Clues: A Journal of Detection in 2000, Butler said, "I was determined she [Daniels] should be a success and I suppose in a sense I was basing her on what would have happened to me if I'd remained in academic life when on the whole in my day, even more so now, women do climb the ladder. I was in the generation that was expecting to be successful as a woman in whatever field they ventured."  

In Melville's A Different Kind of Summer, dating from 1967, the fifth outing for Detective Daniels, Daniels is still a sergeant when an unidentified body arrives on a train into town in a coffin minus head or hands. It's up to Daniels to figure out which of many missing women this could be, including an increasing number of young girls vanishing in London. As she gets deeper into the case, she tries to stay objective and focused even as she starts receiving menacing phone calls and has to deal with a new young assistant, Christine Quinn, and a hysterical troublemaker who claims she's lost her sister.

There's been a lot of hue and cry lately about the amount of violence against women in crime fiction novels, and a mutilated female corpse would fall into that category. But in a commentary included in the original publication of A Different Kind of Summer, Melville said that she was interested in people committing crimes and why some people, usually women, form the "victim syndrome," in that the bad guys sense these victims are afraid (a reason why policewomen acting as decoys often fail to lure attackers, because their sense of confidence is too obvious).

Melville has a low-key writing style, blending social commentary with quirky characters, detailed plotting and thoughtful writing for the most part, although in general, it's her novels with Inspector John Coffin where she's had her greatest success. One wonders if writing from a woman's point of view was too close to home to provide the inspirational distance required or if perhaps the fact the author's brother was Warden of the Toynbee Settlement in London gave her more of a first-hand experience with male protagonists. In either case, with Melvill's Daniels or Butler's Coffin, there's a lot of good material there, enough to show that grouping her with the "Four Great Founding Mothers" isn't that much of a stretch. If you're a fan of the "Golden Age" of detective fiction, then you'll enjoy these two series.

And now for this week's links, with more books to add to your To Be Read pile:

• Sergio Angelini - So Long as You Both Shall Live by Ed McBain
• Les Blatt - Necklace and Calabash by Robert Van Gulik
• Brian Busby - Doing Right by Robert Fontaine 
• Bill Crider - Flesh Avenger by J. X. Williams (a/k/a Harry Whittington)
• Martin Edwards – The Sunset Law by John Buxton Hilton
• Curt Evans - The Corpse Wore a Wig by George Busby
• Roy Garraty - Fade to Blonde by Max Phillips
• Ed Gorman - Cross Country by Herbert D. Kastle
• Rich Horton -  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos
• Nick Jones - The Assassination Run by Jack Gerson
• George Kelley - Johnny Mayhem: The Complete Series by Milton Lesser
• Margot Kinberg - The Ritual Bath by Faye Kellerman
• Rob Kitchin - Tropical Freeze by James W. Hall and Margin of Error by Edna Buchanan
• Evan Lewis - The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett
• Steve Lewis/William F. Deeck - The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie
• Todd Mason – FFB Redux - by Carol Emshwiller and more
• Neer - Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• John F. Norris - The Body by Richard Ben Sapir
• Juri Nummelin - Four crime novels by British writer John Wainwright
• John O'Neill - The Black Veil & Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths edited by Mark Valentine
• James Reasoner - The Streak by Max Brand (a/k/a Frederick Faust)
• Karyn Reeves - The Big Heat by William P. McGivern
• Richard Robinson - Torch Town Boogie by Steven Womack
• Gerard Saylor - Burnt Offering by Richard and Francis Lockridge
• Ron Scheer - Big Timber by Bertrand W. Sinclair
• Kerrie Smith - The Inspector Barlach Mysteries by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
• Kevin Tipple/Barry Ergang - Fast One by Paul Cain
• TomCat - The Case of the Weird Sisters by Charlotte Armstrong
• Prashant Trikannad - "Anne" by Fanny Stevenson (Scribner’s Magazine)
• Rich Westwood - Death Walks in Eastrepps by Francis Beeding

You Disappear

Danish novelist Christian Jungersen worked as a copywriter for an ad agency and then as a TV script consultant and a film teacher before turning his hand to novels—and has since been published in more than 20 countries. His first novel, Undergrowth (Danish title Krat) won Denmark's Best First Novel award and went on to become a bestseller. His latest novel, the psychological suspense title You Disappear, was voted the best novel of 2012 by Danish library users, and it was on the Danish bestseller list for fiction for more than a year. Translated into English by Misha Hoekstra, it was released in that version earlier this year. 

You Disappear is the story of Mia, an elementary schoolteacher in Denmark whose husband, Frederik, is the talented, highly respected headmaster of a local private school. During a vacation in Spain, Frederik has an accident and his visit to the hospital reveals a brain tumor that is gradually altering his personality, confirming Mia's suspicions that her husband is no longer the man he used to be. Now she must protect herself and their teenage son, Niklas, from the strange, blunted, often violent being who lives in her husband's body—and with whom she must share her home, her son, and her bed.

When it emerges that Frederik embezzled millions of crowns from his school, the consequences of his condition envelope the entire community. Increasingly isolated, Mia faces more tough questions. Had his illness already changed him back then when he still seemed so happy? What are the legal ramifications? In her support group for spouses of people with brain injuries, Mia meets a defense attorney named Bernhard. Together they help prepare for Frederik's court case by immersing themselves in the latest brain research and in classic philosophical questions of free will, while simultaneously navigating the uncertain waters of their growing mutual infatuation.

Kirkus noted that the book is "An intelligent, at times even intellectual, novel about philosophical issues of identity and moral responsibility . . . Jungersen writes brilliantly and raises knotty questions of identity." The author himself tackled this question in a recent Q&A, finding himself particularly obsessed with illness and our vulnerability, that our personalities could be snatched from us via a stroke, brain cancer, or Alzheimer's. Do we have a soul or are we merely products of our biochemical brain cocktails? Do you become someone else when you’ve suffered brain damage?

Jungersen is a dedicated researcher, and this book was no exception. He flew to Dartmouth College to talk to a neurophilosopher there, and also visited a number of teachers in Farum, the Copenhagen suburb where You Disappear unfolds. He spoke with doctors, lawyers, accountants, and even contacted a man who’d been convicted of swindling, in the prison where the man was serving time. All that research pays off in both the level of realistic detail offered up in this fascinating book and in the interstitial material that explains some of the thornier concepts.

You Disappear is part romantic novel, part philosophical treatise, part suspense thriller, but at its core is the search for identity and where we stand within our families and communities. As Jungersen notes, "A few years ago, ADHD and depression were personality traits; now they are illnesses that we can medicate our way out of. Soon we might also have drugs for laziness, hot tempers, self-absorption, and the inability to make long-term plans. It was my ridiculously ambitious hope to discover a story that fit this previously unheard-of way of understanding people – and with it, a genuinely new narrative form."