Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Now that the summer is almost over and my course is going to start on September 8, it’s time to let you know what I’ll be teaching this fall at the Brandeis Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (BOLLI).  It’s titled WHODUNIT?:  MURDER IS EVERYWHERE.

The class will be reading eight novels that I chose both to highlight countries on several continents and to explore the differences between the various types of protagonists.  These books showcase police detectives, private investigators, and amateurs who find themselves involved in crimes.  We’ll discuss how the differences in their roles play a part in the investigations.  Do police officials make better crime solvers because of the weight of their governments behind them, or are private individuals (licensed or amateur) more efficient because they are not bound by laws and official statutes and thus have more freedom to investigate?

We start with The Dry (Jane Harper), which features an Australian police officer returning to his home town in the Outback to attend a funeral and then becomes involved investigating the murders of a family that he knew from childhood.  In Finding Nouf (Zoe Ferraris), we go Saudi Arabia to follow a desert guide looking for a missing woman.  Next it’s Tokyo; in Newcomer (Keigo Higashino) we learn how an experienced police officer has his own unique methods of solving a crime.  In  Whip Hand (Dick Francis) we’ll read how an English champion jockey becomes a private investigator after suffering a life-altering injury.  We will come face to face with anti-Muslim and anti-foreigner hatred in Québec in A Deadly Divide (Ausma Kehanat Khan).  In The Mist (Ragnar Jónasson), a policewoman tries to break through the anti-female feelings of her fellow officers by looking into a missing person case in an isolated Icelandic village.  The Kind Worth Killing (Peter Swanson) starts with two strangers on a plane from London to Boston plotting the murder of the man’s wife.  And we’ll complete our course with Norwegian by Night (Derek B. Miller) which tells the story of an elderly man who moves from the United States to Oslo to live with his granddaughter and her husband and finds himself protecting a young boy from foreign killers.

I hope I’ve piqued your interest and that you’ll read along with my class as we come to the painful truth that yes, MURDER IS EVERYWHERE.

Marilyn

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