4 new foreign mysteries to give you chills this Halloween

Craving a mystery from beyond our borders? Here are four great new mysteries from all over the world.

2. 'Death in August,' by Marco Vichi (translated by Stephen Sartarelli)

The Place: Florence, Italy
The Time: The summer of 1963
The Victim: Signora Pedretti
The Detective: Inspector Bordelli
 
It's hot in summertime Florence, sticky and still, the air only seeming to move when someone sprays pesticide to keep the bugs away. A crumbling villa holds an aristocratic old woman who lies in her bed, a terrified expression on her face and life gone from her body. A sleep-deprived detective gets the case and must dig into a family's peculiarities in search of a murderer. Or two.

A thoughtful, intelligent, and somewhat tortured middle-aged male detective from Italy? Sopresa! Despite their similarities, however, Inspector Bordelli is no clone of bestselling author Donna Leon's Commissario Guido Brunetti of Venice. Bordelli lives in a different time (not Brunetti's present) and is haunted by the war of just a few years earlier. He has less technology to rely upon and doesn't spend as much time noodling around in his brain. His focus – and the author's – is on the suspects, the investigators, and the crime.

The appeal of "Death in August" doesn't lie in its setting, since readers don't really learn much about Florence. Instead, its charms come from quirky, dark characters and the mystery itself, a classic-style whodunit that unfolds elegantly and plausibly.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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