Well, I hadn’t heard of The Empusium until a friend recommended it. She also wrote Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which I’ve heard a bunch of good things about and haven’t read.

Journey By Moonlight is really wonderful imo, it has a pretty much perfect narrative voice that’s very fond of the characters but is always kind of letting you in on the joke. It’s basically about a 30-something dude from Hungary who is traveling with his new wife on their honeymoon through Europe, has a chance encounter with an old friend, and is struck by such powerful longing to find out what happened to his creepy friends from his teenage years that he abandons his wife to go running across Europe looking for them. His wife decides that she might as well do some exploring of her own. It’s very charming and melancholy and has a pretty progressive approach to sex and marital fidelity for the 1930s.

The Martin Beck books are very enjoyable, the first couple aren’t great but after that they’re very consistent - 10 books that trace the gradual progress of the lives of these cops in Stockholm and the the sinking of Swedish society into violence and right-wing politics. The authors were Marxists, with senses of humor - they’re the sorts of books where everyone’s basically miserable but there are moments of complete absurdity. The last book has a great punchline.