Ready to move on from Larsson? Try Henning Mankell.

Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy, starting with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in the form of the books as well as the Swedish movie versions and the not-yet-made-but-much-discussed American movie versions, has been everywhere recently. (Alyssa wrote about it here and here.) If you're done with the Larsson books, or were deterred by their length or the amount of violence, I'd recommend taking a look at Larsson's countryman Henning Mankell.

Mankell's Inspector Wallander crime novels have the same bleak but appealing Swedish flavor as Larsson's books, but Mankell is a better writer, and his books are even more compulsively readable. Wallander is an admirable but flawed hero, and a nice antidote to the too-perfect and too-desired Mikael Blomkvist. He's an exceptional police detective, but he has problems with his ex-wife and teen daughter and aging father, so he drinks and listens to opera and contemplates the fate of Swedish society. There's a lot of anxiety about society in these books, and the characters are trying to sort out how issues like immigration actually affect their daily lives. Despite this underlying tension, though, the mysteries themselves are superbly plotted and thoroughly satisfying. So brew yourself a cup of coffee and curl up with Faceless Killers, the first in the series. (The coffee is important. People drink coffee ALL THE TIME in these books. If you like coffee at all, you're going to end up craving it as you read.) An added bonus: All the snow provides a nice escape from the current heat wave.

(If you'd rather watch your mysteries - or you want to both read and watch - never fear! The BBC has made six of the novels, so far, into adaptations starring Kenneth Branagh. They play on PBS's Masterpiece: Mystery!, or you can get them from Netflix.)