JACK BATTEN

An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed By Helene Tursten Soho, 272 pages, $18.99

If you’re anticipating someone ancient and cute, a Miss Marple type, perish the thought. The “elderly lady” of this Swedish crime fiction is a single senior named Maud (no surname revealed) who happens to be a stone cold killer. In her prime working years, Maud taught languages at a girls’ high school, and in her retirement, she lives comfortably and travels southern Africa. At each stage, a murder here and there eases her way. All of this is cleverly plotted in five connected short stories. Each tale brings a touch of suspense, but it’s the final story, the longest by far, that offers what could possibly be the book’s raison d’être: an explanation, some justification, a summing up that reveals 88-yearold Maud in full. Or maybe not.

April In Spain By John Banville Hanover Square Press, 320 pages, $34.99

The veteran Irish writer John Banville is so firmly in charge of his storytelling that the reader hardly cares that raging coincidences trigger much of his new book’s plot. In fact, Banville allows all manner of semiperverse episodes to decorate the narrative this time out. His principal series character, the Dublin police pathologist Quirke, is on hand, but unexpectedly he functions as a plot catalyst, not as a solver of mysteries. It happens that on holiday with his wife in Spain’s Basque Country, he spots a Dublin woman who was supposed to have been murdered back home a few years earlier. News of the Quirke discovery sends fresh players into the plot, one of them a professional hit man, hustling to Spain. What follows, in a tale shoved along by happenstance, is much wickedness and tragedy climaxing in a final blood-letting of mini-Shakespearean proportions. Jack Batten