If you can get to a tropical island any time soon, then reading fiction set in paradise is (more or less) the next best thing. It's hot, it's sunny and you can almost feel the sand beneath your feet, dive in and enjoy a good read "See a location through an author's eyes"
☼ ☼ The Maldives ☼ Tuin ☼ KoPhi Phi Island ☼ ☼
The TripFiction team conjectures from events in the book, that this book is set in The Maldives; however the book only acknowledges that it is set somewhere "exotic". It encapsulates island life through the eyes of a hotel manager in a 6* resort....
How does it feel to live and work in the world's most beautiful and luxurious tropical island resort, surrounded by white sandy beaches and aquamarine seas? How does it feel to be in the lap of luxury when you're thousands of miles from anywhere else? And when the guests are some of the richest and most demanding people in the world, where do you find the energy every day to smile, smile and smile again?
Another Maldives set novel: When thirty-year-old English teacher Anna Emerson is offered a summer job tutoring T.J. Callahan at his family's holiday home in the Maldives, she accepts without hesitation: a tropical island beats the library any day!
T.J. has no desire to leave town, not that anyone asked him. He's almost seventeen and has had cancer. Anna and T.J. are en route to join T.J.'s family in the Maldives when the pilot of their seaplane suffers a fatal heart attack and crash-lands in the Indian Ocean. Marooned on an uninhabited island, Anna and T.J. work together to obtain water, food, fire and shelter but, as the days turn to weeks then months and finally years, Anna begins to wonder if the biggest challenge of all might be living with a boy who is gradually becoming a man...
Now take yourselves back to the 1980s and 1990s and there are two outstanding books which delve into the vagaries of tropical island life, one read, the quintessential "The Beach" was turned into a film with Leonardo di Caprio and charts the demise of the good life on an island near Ko Phi Phi in Thailand; the other is "Castaway" a year on the island of Tuin, just off the coast of Papua New Guinea and Australia - Lucy Irvine responds to an advertisement " Writer seeks "wife" for a year on a tropical island" and this is an account of her time spent experiencing remote island life with a man she barely knows. Both books in their different ways capture the heat, the tropics, the isolation and how people face challenging situations....
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The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell. Sweden, winter, 1991. Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team receive an anonymous tip-off. A few days later a life raft is washed up on a beach. In it are two men, dressed in expensive suits, shot dead. The dead men were criminals, victims of what seems to have been a gangland hit. But what appears to be an open-and-shut case soon takes on a far more sinister aspect. Wallander travels across the Baltic Sea, to Riga in Latvia, where he is plunged into a frozen, alien world of police surveillance, scarcely veiled threats, and lies. Doomed always to be one step behind the shadowy figures he pursues, only Wallander's obstinate desire to see that justice is done brings the truth to light.
The Mind's Eye by Håkan Nesser starts out with Janek Mitter, as he stumbles into his bathroom one morning after a night of heavy drinking, to find his beautiful young wife, Eva, floating dead in the bath. She has been brutally murdered. Yet even during his trial Mitter cannot summon a single memory of attacking Eva, nor a clue as to who could have killed her if he had not. Drawing a blank after exhaustive interviews, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren remains convinced that something, or someone, in the dead woman’s life has caused these tragic events. But the reasons for her speedy remarriage have died with her. And as he delves even deeper, Van Veeteren realizes that the past never stops haunting the present . . . 
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. His books have sold over 60 millions copies worldwide and this is the first in the Millenium Trilogy. Setin Södermalm, a trendy, bohemian district in Stockholm, where charming galleries and cafes mingle with historic wooden cottages.Central to the plot are Kalle Blomquist, a journalist convicted of libel and Lisbeth Salander, an expert system hacker and investigator, who can see patterns and links in the investigation that are not evident to to others. Blomquist is employed to investigate the unsolved disappearance of Harriet Vanger in the 1960's and together they start to explore the complex story - violence, and suspense, set against a Nordic backdrop. 