Review of The Shadow District by Arnaldur Indridason (2017, Vintage; Icelandic 2013)

1944, Reykjavik. A young woman’s body is discovered behind the new national theatre, currently being used as a store by the occupying allied forces. The murder is investigated by a local detective, Flovent, and a Canadian military policeman with Icelandic roots, Thorsen. Their initial suspects are an American soldier and his Icelandic girlfriend who discovered the body and fled the scene, but their investigation soon moves on. The present day, a ninety year old man is found suffocated in his bed. In the house are newspaper cuttings related to the war time case. A retired detective, Konrad, remembers the case having grown up in the district and his father trying to profit from it. He starts his own investigation with the blessing of the police, tracking the last movements and actions of the dead man and simultaneously trying to piece together the original war-time case.

The Shadow District is the first book in a new series by Arnaldur Indridason charting the cases of Flovent and Thorsen and set in war-time Iceland. Somewhat unusually, this first instalment concerns their last case together before Thorsen moves on with the occupying army to continental Europe then returning to Canada, and also has a second main thread set sixty five years or so later. The story pivots between the two periods tracking the investigation into the murder of young woman in 1944 and the death of an elderly man decades later. The lynch-pin is Konrad, a retired CID detective, who remembers the original case as a child and is intrigued by the man’s suspicious death. As such, there are two police procedural tales being told in parallel, with the chapters alternating between the two periods as Flovent and Thorsen work their investigation and Konrad also re-pieces it together as he tries to work out the connections across time and people between the cases. As usual, Indridason tells the tale in an under-stated way without relying on overly-contrived plot devices or melodrama, letting the two stories unfold in a credible and engaging way. The result is an intriguing story populated with realistic characters, scenarios and police work, with a strong sense of place and time.

Review of Oblivion by Arnaldur Indridason (Vintage, 2014)

1979, Erlendur is a rookie detective with the Reykjavik police.  When a body is found in an isolated thermal pond not far from an American military base, Erlendur and his boss, Marion Briem investigate. The body has been dropped from a great height onto a hard floor and once they discover the man worked as an aircraft mechanic their attention quickly turns to the base and its massive aircraft hangars.  However, the base is US territory and they have no interest in collaborating with the Icelandic police, leaving the detectives frustrated and trying to find alternative sources of information.  In parallel, Erlendur decides to pursue a cold case that has obsessed him for some time – the death of a young woman near to an old US base from the Second World War that was occupied by Icelandic families when it was abandoned.  It doesn’t take him long to find a couple of threads that were poorly investigated at the time of her disappearance. 

Oblivion is the second prequel novel to the original Erlendur series.  In this outing, it’s 1979, Erlendur has separated from his wife, is estranged from his five year old daughter, and is now working as a detective in CID under the supervision of Marion Briem, his long-term mentor.  Erlendur is investigating two cases that have links to American bases in Iceland.  The first concerns an Icelandic man they suspect has been murdered on the present base, though the US military refuse to cooperate.  The second is a cold case concerning the disappearance of a young woman twenty five years ago who was receiving records bought on a US army base and lived near to a decommissioned one.  Indridason spins out the two stories with his usual unhurried, thoughtful, often dour, prose that matches the disposition of his main character.  Both plotlines are reasonably interesting, with Indridason sticking with their more mundane, familial aspects rather than shifting gears into thriller territory, though the more contemporary thread raises questions about the presence of the US military in Iceland and the troubled relationship between locals and interlopers.  It was a shame that both plotlines relied on weak plot devices to move them forward.  Nonetheless, Oblivion is another nice addition to the Erlendur series.

Review of Reykjavik Nights by Arnaldur Indridason (Harvill Secker, 2014)

A relatively new recruit to the Icelandic police force, Erlendur works nights as a traffic cop dealing with drunk drivers and accidents, domestic disputes and street fights, robberies and whatever else comes his way.  One evening he pulls a dead homeless person from a shallow pool.  The case is ruled suicide and soon forgotten by all but the stoic cop who isn’t convinced by the verdict and becomes obsessed with uncovering the man’s life and death.  Aware that a local woman disappeared on the same weekend, Erlendur becomes convinced that there might be a link between the two cases.  In his spare time he slowly pieces together the lives of the homeless man and missing woman.  However, rather than telling his bosses of his discoveries he keeps his investigation a secret, reluctant to lose control of his quest and to unnecessarily smear the memories of his two victims.

Reykjavik Nights is a prequel to the popular Inspector Erlendur stories, set not long after he starts to work for the police.  Already obsessed with missing persons or the lives of those that drop out of ordinary society, he is drawn to the cases of a homeless man found drown and a local woman who has vanished.  Despite having no mandate to investigate either case, Erlendur patiently seeks answers.  Given his lack of experience he is somewhat naïve and hesitant, feeling his way by instinct.  As with the other books in the series, Reykjavik Nights is as much about Erlendur and Icelandic society as it is the cases.  Indeed, the cases are quite mundane and straightforward but what makes them interesting is Erlendur’s attempt to tackle them.  Oddly, that in itself is quite mundane with few tension points, but Indridason somehow makes its engaging.  I think this is do with an evenly paced plot and the cadence of the prose – one is soon caught in a steady moving stream with pleasant scenery, with a few eddies but no rapids or waterfalls.  The result is an enjoyable police procedural with an inevitable but satisfying conclusion.

Review of Strange Shores by Arnaldur Indridason (Harvill Secker, 2013)

Drawn to Eastern Iceland in search of the brother he lost in a snow storm decades previously, Detective Erlendur has taken to sleeping in the ruins of his childhood home and wandering the mountains.  One morning he meets Boas, an elderly farmer, and they chat about a young woman, Matthildur, and some British soldiers who had died on the same night in a blizzard on the moor.  Unlike the soldiers, Matthildur’s body was never found.  Intrigued, Erlendur begins to investigate her tale, tracking down those still alive who knew her.  The more he teases apart her story, the more he’s convinced that there is more to her disappearance than at first meets the eye.

Strange Shores is the final instalment of the ‘Murder in Reykjavik’ series featuring Detective Erlendur.  Erlendur has always been haunted by the disappearance of his brother in a snow storm and the fact that his body was never found.  He blames himself for the death and searches the moors for his final resting place.  He is drawn to the story of Matthildur, a young woman who similar vanished whilst walking in the hills.  Indridason weaves these two threads together in Strange Shores.  As with previous books, the pace is often slow, ponderous and reflexive.  That in itself is fine, however, the story suffered from two issues.  First, after a decent start, it began to feel like a novella extended into a novel, with too much of the tale not moving the story forward.  Second, some of the dialogue felt clunky, which might have been a translation effect, but disrupted the narrative.  Further, the conclusion of the story seemed to be oddly out of key.  My overall impression then was that Strange Shores has the usual trademark melancholy, atmosphere and sense of place of the other tales in the series, but the plot and telling was weaker and thinner than some of the other books.

Review of Black Skies by Arnaldur Indridason (Harvill Secker, 2012)

Sigurdur Oli has found himself at a crossroads.  His long-term relationship has recently come to an end and his life has not turned out as he hoped.  He’s even questioning whether he wants to continue being a police officer.  When a friend who is being blackmailed asks for unofficial help, he agrees to try and resolve the issue.  He arrives at the blackmailer’s house to find her badly injured and her attacker fleeing.  He calls for backup and an ambulance, but is unwilling to tell his colleagues what he was doing there in the first place.  He should withdraw from the investigation, but instead he sets off trying to solve the case by himself.  Slowly he starts to piece things together, whilst also trying to come to terms with his own social situation and his father’s illness, and dealing with a tramp who keeps trying to tell him something important but never quite imparts his tale.

Having read all seven, translated police procedural novels by Arnaldur Indridason featuring Erlandur and his team, I was looking forward to reading Black Skies.  It was, however, a book I struggled to get into and I might have put it to one side to pick up again later except for the fact that it was the only reading material I had on a flight.  The first hundred pages or so seemed ponderous and lifeless, the writing, especially the dialogue, flat.  Sigurdur Oli is out of sorts and so is the tale.  Indridason’s writing is always a little ponderous, building up in layers, gently engulfing the reader in an atmospheric fog, but it didn’t quite work in the first half of Black Skies.  However, by the second half of the book the story took on more shape, purpose and pace, with the various strands being woven together to create a nice tapestry.   It was almost if Indridason started off without really knowing Sigurdur or the plot and developed each as the story unfolded, slowly putting a form on each.  The tale itself, with its three interconnected storylines - the murder investigation, Sigurdur’s private life, and Andreas’ disassembly - eventually work themselves out nicely.  Moreover, given that the story is set just prior to the Icelandic financial meltdown it provides a nice insight into the national psyche concerning its new found wealth and its trappings.  Overall, a book that takes a while to get going, but rounds out into a satisfactory police procedural.

Review of Outrage by Arnaldur Indridason

Inspector Erlendur is away and Elinborg, one his trusty colleagues, is left to deal with any new cases. As a senior detective she is trying to balance the pressures of work with home life and looking after her three kids and husband. When the body of a young man is found in his apartment with his throat slashed she is assigned to the case. The investigation quickly alters track when a date-rape drug is found in his possession. It seems that one of his victims, or someone known to them, has exacted a terrible revenge. Despite her revulsion for his crimes, Elinborg patiently pieces together the events leading to the young man's death, whilst also trying to maintain a harmonious domestic life.

I finished Outrage just over a week before I sat down to write this review. What is unsettling is the fact that a lot of the plot had already started to slip away from my memory. I know I enjoyed reading the book a lot, but a fair bit failed to stick to the old grey cells. This has led me to reflect a little on Indridason's other translated books - all of which I've read. I've a mixed memory with respect to them. For example, I remember Jar City very well even though it's a few years since I've read it, but although Hypothermia was one of my books of 2010, I can't for the life of me recall what it was about (and I'm usually pretty good at remembering books and their plots). I think this is because Indridason's forte is ordinary characters and exposing the mundane and banal aspects of everyday life and police investigations. His stories are carefully layered and reflective, are philosophical in a literary sense, and have fairly ambiguous endings. It is the style, atmosphere and the central characters that linger not the plot. They're books that create a certain mood, rather than a visceral impact. That's also the reason why I like them so much. Outrage is a fine addition to the series, allowing one of the support characters to come to the fore. The reader finds out much more about Elinborg and her family circumstances and history, which was a nice complement to simply tracking Erlendur from book to book. Despite the fact that the stories seem to slip away from me, I'll be in the queue for the next one.

Review of Operation Napoleon by Arnaldur Indridason (Harvill Secker, 2010, published in Icelandic 1999)

In the middle of a fierce storm at the tail end of the Second World War a German bomber crashes into the vast Vatnajokull glacier on Iceland. One man sets off for help, the pilot and five passengers remain with the plane, slowly being covered with thick snow and being swallowed by the ice. Forty four years later and the melting glacier starts to give up its secret. The American secret service sends in a team to try and salvage the plane without alerting the Icelandic government of its mission. However, their presence on the glacier is discovered by two young mountain rescuers out on a training mission. Elias manages to briefly phone his sister Kristin, a lawyer for the Foreign Ministry, before he is surrounded by soldiers. Not only will he have to die to protect the secret of Operation Napoleon, but so will his sister. But when two American operatives force their way into her apartment she manages to escape. Fearing a conspiracy between the American and Icelandic governments she doesn’t know who to turn to, all she knows is that her brother is in trouble and quite possibly dead, and the American’s want her likewise. On the run, she resolves to find out the secret of the crashed bomber.

Operation Napoleon was originally published in Icelandic in 1999, Indridason’s third book after the first two, as yet untranslated, Detective Erlendur novels. Unlike his police procedural novels, Operation Napoleon is a thriller. The strengths of the book are the characterisation and the pace. Kristin is well penned and her back story well elaborated, and the other characters have sufficient depth to be memorable and credible. Indridason keeps the pace high throughout, with sufficient tension to keep the reader turning the pages. Where the book suffers, however, is with respect to the story. It starts well enough, with Indridason setting the characters and back story in place, but from the minute Kristin ends up on the run it is difficult to believe in the story. It’s interesting, and at times exciting, but never really credible. The minute I start to ask, ‘but why didn’t ...?’ or ‘how come ...?’ questions a story is in trouble. I was asking these questions every twenty pages or so. And the ending is simply ludicrous. I won’t say anything to avoid spoilers, but however history would have unfolded it would not have resulted in this ending. Given the pacing, the book lacks the introspection and philosophical elements that are the real strengths of the Erlendur novels. Overall, a fairly entertaining book as long as you’re prepared to suspend your sense of realism.

A review of Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indridason (Harvill Secker 2009; 2007 Icelandic)

A middle-aged woman is found hanging from a beam in her summer cottage, a few metres from Lake Thingvellir.  The woman had long been depressed and the death of her mother two years previously had sent her on a downwards spiral.  The death seems like a straightforward case of suicide.  And yet, Detective Erlunder, senses that something isn’t quite right.  No stranger to loss and depression himself, he starts to piece together her life, undertaking an unofficial investigation in order to understand why she hung herself, confounding his colleagues and upsetting the woman’s husband.  At the same time he takes a look at two unresolved cases, a young man and woman who simply disappeared in the 1970s.  All three deaths inevitably make him reflect on the death of his younger brother in a snowstorm when they were children, which he survived, and his sense of loss and guilt.

Hypothermia is a book that slowly draws you in, wraps a warm blanket around you and envelopes you in intricately woven narrative layers.  Indridson’s skill is in the plotting and pacing of stories; in placing his readers in the landscape and culture of Iceland and capturing the humdrum interweaving of lives, the mundane and everyday conflicts and betrayals, and exploring the small and petty things that people do to each other.  The under-stated narrative is driven by a steady pace and emotional register, rather than high tension or drama, with the same questions about love, loss, guilt and life after death repeated discordantly with respect to the cases Erlunder investigates and his own life.  The result is a book with qualities like a fine wine – a subtle but complex blend of colours, smells and tastes rather than the whiz-bang of a rollercoaster.  Hypothermia is a fine addition to the Erlunder series which has developed into a strong and satisfying set of stories that make perfect reading for wet and windy nights.