Hannah Krause-Bendix is still a nightmare of a woman. Since writing a crime novel based on her experiences as a character in Thirty days of darkness, she is now a financially stable writer, but since that stability comes from genre, not literary fiction, she despises her work, her readers and the empty (to her) rituals of book publicity. Once again, a public tantrum – this time on Danish daytime TV – sees her take a plane out of Copenhagen. She has promised to write a second crime novel, she’s written nothing, and she’s spent the advance. Editor Bastian has another hidey-hole in which she can write the novel for which she’s contracted. Not Iceland this time: summertime Sicily Under the Blazing Sun. But we aren’t surprised when there’s a murder in short order, and that Hannah, somewhat farcically, bumbles about stupidly and bravely, irritating the police, the mafia and just about everyone else until various crimes are solved.

I wasn’t sure whether the ludicrous chaos which Hannah both causes and falls victim to would last for a second novel. And her boorishness on TV made me wonder whether I’d really want to spend another novel in her company. I’m not going to buy that she’s ‘strangely appealing’. The flashes of self-knowledge are outweighed by chapter-by-chapter demonstrations of what long-distant and married lover Margrét describes as ‘insufferable self-centredness and certainty that [she’s] always right.’ Hannah is the sort of person who calls people for help and resents that they provide it. If she is a great writer, about which I am sceptical, it is despite her bland, clichéd, smug, snobbish world view and unobservant perspectives on the human condition.

But, of course, I deeply enjoyed Under the Blazing Sun. Some writers love the characters they create, others seem to find them irritating. Madsen seems to ask: what fun can I have with them? So if Hannah is built to be simultaneously strong- and weak-willed, nemesis Jørn is the opposite: a man who embraces the gift of life that he has been given. He doesn’t quite believe his success – though he is quite happy to embrace the fortunes it gives him – and I love that both he and Madsen take such pleasure in celebrating his ludicrousness. There is a chapter where Jørn and Hannah are creeping around a house having broken into it, and each time they try something new he’ll refer to a lazily-titled novel of his in which the protagonists have tried the same manoeuvre. Somehow, we end up rooting for Hannah even though I wish never to meet her in real life. That takes some doing.

This being mafia country, Madsen herself is not above making a reference to The Godfather, and if you squint hard enough there’s a possible homage to Pulp Fiction. I think this the first time I’ve come across Paul Russell Garrett as a translator, and he’s done a crisp, deft job.

Under the Blazing Sun is ideal summer holiday reading. It’s funny and full-on, and Madsen leaves us wanting still more of this flawed and appalling protagonist.

Cafethinking’s coverage of Thirty Days of Darkness, book one of the Murder by the Book series.

Thanks to Orenda Books for the review copy and to Anne Cater for the blog tour invitation