A Couple More Scandinavians and a Fake

There's obviously an appetite for Scandinavian writers as more and more make their way to our shores. Award winning Arne Dahl has published lots in his native Sweden: Misterioso is his first one here. And despite the at-times awkward translation, it's the top of the genre.
Businessmen are being murdered to the tune of a jazz standard. Detective Paul Hjelm is part of an elite team assembled to discover why but in uncovering the secrets of the victims, the question becomes more of why not.
The translation of The Boy in the Suitcase is done by one of the authors herself and this is what makes the novel read so well. The authors, Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis, have worked together before and their writing is seamless. The desire for a 'dream family' is the tragic irony behind the title. Nina Borg is only doing a friend a favour when she picks up the suitcase from a train station locker. Her discovery unravels a horror of child trafficking and illegal adoption. But even in this, the villain is sympathetic in his desire for a family and picket fence life.
It's another English writer who proclaims, on the cover of the book, no less, that "Michael Ridpath is on the warpath, trouncing the Scandinavians on their home turf." Hardly. (Aggressive marketing has always made me flinch. One can just imagine the marketing person pumping her fist in the air over copy!) 
Ridpath writes like a visitor, a well-versed one but still...he's got the addresses but not the atmosphere, the vocabulary but not the cadence of language of the native Scandinavians. There is some reason for this, besides the obvious fact of the author being English: the main character is Icelandic born, transplanted as a child to the States, then as an adult threatened in his job as a cop, transferred over to Iceland. The logistics are unlikely, the juxtaposition, awkward. Regardless of geography, Where the Shadows Lie reads like an American thriller. A bad one.
"There are two things that a cop hates more than anything else. One is a crooked cop. Another is a cop who rats on one of his colleagues."
Whatever happened to the cardinal rule of writing: show, not tell? The reader is constantly being told how Icelanders 'are', whether it's their sex habits, their drinking, their superstitions. Ridpath should stick to his home turf and leave Iceland to the Icelanders. They've already got the best in Yrsa Sigurdardottir and Arnaldur Indridason, and Ridpath, quite frankly, just doesn't compare. 

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