Marilyn's Mystery Reads

I don’t know whether it’s the long snowy winters, the soothing hot springs, or something completely unknown, but the mysteries coming out of Iceland recently are uniformly excellent.

Ari Thór Arason is settling into his life in the small village of Siglufjördur in the northern part of the country.  Small as Siglufjördur is, it’s not as remote as it once was due to the recent construction of a tunnel bringing it closer to the capital Reykjavik.  But with that convenience come crimes that never had been part of village life before.

Ari Thór is one of the town’s two-man police force, consisting of a detective (Ari Thór) and a supervising inspector.  The previous inspector moved to Reykjavik and has been replaced by Herjølfur (many people in Iceland don’t have last names), although Ari Thór himself had hoped to be chosen for that job.  So there’s a bit of tension between the two men, although they are trying hard to work things out.

As Nightblind opens, Herjølfur is approaching an old, seemingly vacant house several miles from the center of Siglufjördur.  There’s something about the abandoned home that’s making him very uneasy, and he wonders if it is wise to investigate it by himself.  But he has no choice after receiving a call stating drug deals were going down there, as Ari Thór has been home ill with the flu for several days.

Herjølfur tries to dispel his fear by walking up to the house and shouting that he is from the police.  Even as he does so he’s aware he’s ignoring his feeling of something really wrong, but he continues onward toward the building.  And then there’s a fatal shot.

Meanwhile, Ari Thór is at home, still very much under the weather.  When the phone rings he expects it to be Herjølfur, asking whether he’ll be at work tomorrow.  Instead, it’s the inspector’s wife, telling Ari Thór that she’s been unable to reach her husband on his cell or the station and that he hadn’t slept at home the previous night.  Ari Thór drags himself into town, looking everywhere for his colleague, and when he’s unable to find him he is sure something really bad has happened.  And, of course, he’s right.

Nightblind is the second of five books in the author’s Dark Iceland series, all featuring Ari Thór.  In the prequel to the series, he is a young theology student.  But in the first book of the series, Snowblind, he has given up his studies and moved to Siglufjördur to think things out.  He has also moved away from his girlfriend Kristín and gotten involved with a village woman.  You can read my review of Snowblind here– https://www.marilynsmysteryreads.com/book-author/ragnar-jonasson.  By the time Nightblind opens, five years after the events in Snowblind, he and Kristín have cautiously reconciled and are the parents of a ten-month old son.

Ari Thór wants to continue to live in Siglufjördur and become the police department’s head, but Kristín is having second thoughts about her move there.  She’s a physician at the local hospital, obviously a much smaller facility than the one she was working at in the capital, and she’s finding herself attracted to another doctor.

Ragar Jónasson has written a spellbinding novel, with deep insights into the many conflicted characters in the book.  You can read about him at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.