Light reading round-up

As always, the peaks and troughs of joy and anxiety - I will never again find a good novel to read, this novel's amazing, this novel's OVER and what am I going to read next?!?

Some Nordic crime fiction: Jussi Adler-Olsen's new Department Q installment (I can't get a handle on the tone of these, but they're not bad); two pleasantly bland Icelandic crime novels by Yrsa Sigurdardottir; Camilla Lackberg, The Drowning (well-written but wildly implausible, and I am annoyed to realize I have come very late to this series, I would have been better off starting at the beginning of the sequence but I didn't like this one so much that I really want to go back to the same characters years earlier); Kristina Ohlsson's The Unwanted (the best of this batch I think, and I am going to order the next one right away).

A fun novel in Sandman Slim vein, Chris Holm's The Collector. (Covers are wasted on me, but this design is very charming, and the book was well-written - second installment already downloaded.)

A high fantasy novel I found remarkably good (hugely impatient now for next segment of story!): Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant. So good! (Robert Redick is the other author in not dissimilar vein that I've read recently with comparable enjoyment.)

And two absolutely delightful novels in a subgenre that's a favorite of mine, near-future Gibsonesque surveillance-society noir: Paul McAuley, Something Coming Through and Edward Ashton, Three Days in April. I thought both of these were extremely good - fresh voices, appealing characters, funny and interesting writing. One has aliens, one doesn't, but the literary DNA is similar in either case....