Natural and Man-made despair (Rating 4 of 5)
» Michael S. Enbar
While there are few surprises in the two tiered time narrative Indridason provides the reader with a gripping portrait of two societies. The rural Iceland of thousand year old sagas of natural beauty and fearsomely dangerous ferocity, unchanging in its austerity, solitude and loneliness for generations. We also see the sordid underbelly of hip Reykavik, where herione addiction, battered women and melancholy young people stand in for the bleak past. I would have liked a bit more fleshing out of Erlendur, the brooding detective whose personal life provides the link between the two Icelandic zones of emotional impoverishment, but one can't have everything in a genre format. The care and attention paid by the homicide detectives for a very cold case is evocative of the need for an isolated and genetically interlinked culture to provide closure to the human imprint upon an endless natural horizon
One of the best I've read this year (Rating 5 of 5)
» Nancy O
Don't pick this one up if you want something warm and fuzzy -- it's definitely the opposite. But then again, it's gloominess somehow seems a propos, considering not only the main story here, but the ongoing story of Erlandur Sveinsson, the main character here. He's not a happy man, nor does he have any reason to be -- his grown children hate him, his ex-wife lies about him and he's got ghosts from his past that continually haunt him. But as a detective, he's got to let all of that go so that he can do his job.
summary, without spoilers: As the story opens, a baby is discovered playing with a piece of a human rib bone. The baby's mother makes her other child take her to where he found the bone, and an entire skeleton is discovered. It seems that the bones are laying in an area that will soon become a housing development, and archaeologists are excavating in the area prior to this happening. The police are called in, and they have no choice but to wait until the archaeologists slowly and carefully work through the excavation to be able to even determine the sex of the bones. All that's known is that the skeleton is probably quite old, rather than recent, anywhere from 50 to 70 years old. While they wait for the archaeologists, Erelendur and his team begin trying to figure out just who may have lived around the area in the past, and to see if anyone may have gone missing around the time whoever it is laying in the ground was put in there. As the police begin their investigations, they become aware that a young woman went missing, presumed a suicide, and that the man to whom she was engaged was the owner of the property years ago, when the area was shared with a military base during WWII. Interwoven with this story is another
about a family of former residents of the area, a woman and her children who find themselves victims of the husband/father, a wife beater who not only uses physical violence, but "kills the soul" as he metes out his abuse. Between the two storylines, you'll find yourself literally unable to put the book down. That, along with Erlendur's personal problems and the ghosts of his past coming back to haunt him, make for one incredible read.
If you've read Jar City, you've got to read this one. The author's characterization is realistic, the story is moving and the writing is excellent. Highly recommended to those who enjoy good mysteries in general, or to those who are looking for at good Scandinavian mystery writer
Graveyard story thriller (Rating 5 of 5)
» R. Semmens
What a book! Weaving two stories together for a huge conclusion. Great mystery and characters
"He knew at once it was a human bone..." (Rating 5 of 5)
» Laurie Fletcher
This is just a spectacular follow-up to Arnaldur's debut mystery, "Jar City". Once again, we have Detective Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson, a fairly miserable human being with special gifts of patience and insight, except when it comes to his own family. The modern-day story is interwoven with a story of unbearable spousal abuse that dates around WWII. When a corpse is found on a hillside outside Reykjavik, we know that these stories will meet, we just don't know how. "He knew at once it was a human bone, when it took if from the baby who was sitting on the floor chewing it." Because the body is clearly not modern, archaeologists are called in to work with the medical examiner and their glacial, careful pace gives the story time to develop. It is a very useful device, because instant information about the deceased would have truncated some of the most important developments as the two stories progress toward a common point. And, indeed, this book is a masterpiece of pacing. It is also an enlightening set piece about Iceland just before, during, and after WWII (even Halley's Comet has a cameo role). For those aficionados of Scandinavian Noire (Mankell, Fossum) or those thinking about give it a go, this is a great entry. But read "Jar City" first.
P.S. Translators can make all the difference in the telling of a story. Special kudos should go to Bernard Scudder, without whom this would have been a lesser book
Stark and Cold in Iceland (Rating 4 of 5)
» Timothy Blankenhorn
Noting an absence of Amazon reviews of this mystery novel, I felt I should
write a brief impression of it.
Iceland may seem exotic to readers like me, but Arnaldur Indridason renders the place and its people in a stark, realistic way that makes of the island the venue for a pretty typical Scandinavian mystery. It is about the banality of life, the loss of the past, and the confusion and puzzlement and pain of citizens uprooted from the stable textures of life as it once was.
In other words, it is a novel that will make sense to most Americans of a certain age.
In the story, children discover a human bone in the construction site of a new development on the rural outskirts of Reykjavik. Tracking down the story of the murder is the responsibility of a middle-aged, depressed detective, Inspector Erlendur, whose life is even more miserable than most leading-man detectives in the Scandanavian genre. His ex-wife hates him with striking vehemence, he is possessed by a deep-seated guilt from an act in his childhood, and his estranged daughter, a druggie pregnant by who knows whom, teeters on the edge of death in an Intensive Care ward.
On top of that real-time story line is the narrative from the past, about a family traumatized by an abusive man.
Is it a good story? Yes. Well-written and memorable.
But it is not a "pleasant" one. You pays yer money and you makes yer choice
(Rating 4 of 5)
(Rating 5 of 5)
