The Black Book - Ian Rankin

A very early Rebus novel, but already with all the main characters and Rebus ticks.

The Impossible Dead - Ian Rankin

A detective story focused on Detective Fox from Complaints.  More intellectual than the Rebus books, but just as good.  Underlying theme - behind every fortune, and every successful politician lies a crime, or at least a lie.

Before the Frost - Henning Mankell

A Wallander mystery.  Wallander and his daughter Linda both figure as detectives in this book.
A good spin out of a mystery, based on religious cults.

NIghts Below Station Street - David Adams Richards

Richards always looks at what passes as the underside of society - the marginal, the poor, the inarticulate, the forgotten.  Not much happens in the story itself, but the voice the story is told in is everything.  It is third person, but the language is the voice of the marginalized characters that are the heroes of the story - Joe Walsh and his wife.  I recognize the voice as that of some of my older relatives from Quebec, but with an edge that comes from a desperation and chaos that they did not know. 
As usual, the educated and socially pretentious get skewered....

One Step Behind - Henning Mankell

The best Mankell book I have read so far.  A Wallander mystery.  Wonderful use of settings.  Characters intriguing.  Interesting exploration of the psychotic mind.

Dogs at the Perimeter - Madeleine Thien

This novel is set in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge period.  A very interior novel, with the main character undergoing almost a form of madness after her experiences during the regime's emptying of Phnom Pen.  It seems this is Thien's theme, regime traumas of the east Asia?  Her writing reminds me of Ondaatje - the same weaving back and forth between a traumatic past and a stable present, and an inability to find a place of peace between the two.

The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

Well-written, clever, but I am surprised this book banned and Bulgakov was never published in  Russia during communist times.  I really don't see any back story or hints of criticism of the regime.  About the only thing you could say is that is in not really a glorification of the working class and the (imaginary) worker society of communist Russia.  Bulgakov seems more in the tradition of Russian short story writers like Gogol.