My first introduction to the works of Ragnar Jonasson was Nightblind. I read Nightblind in 2018 and while i was reading book 2 in the series, the series was already up to book #5. Additionally, Ragnar started a second series in 2018 the Hidden Island series. That series was up to book #3 in 2021 when I read The Darkness.. Anyway, as I discovered the books I got really confused about what book number I read in what series! Here is book ! in the Hidden Iceland Series The Darkness

The Darkness

The Darkness features Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir of the Reykjavík police. A 64 year-old widow she is waiting out her time until she can retire at 65. However, her employers have other ideas and soon Hulda is forced into an early retirement. She is given two weeks to go home and wait until her official retirement begins.

Rather than being allowed to  continue to work  on her caseload, she is told she can work on a cold case of her choice.

Hulda chooses the case of a young Russian woman whose body had washed up on an Icelandic shore a year earlier. A cursory investigation was completed. The death was declared a suicide and the case is quietly closed.

As Hulda starts to dig into the case, she quickly realizes it may not have been a suicide but rather a murder.

As the novel progresses the reader is provided two parallel story lines told in flashbacks

One story line involves a mother who had to place her illegitimate baby daughter in a care facility because she couldn’t afford to take care of her. And their struggles throughout the child’s life.

The other story is about a young women who is taken on a trip to an isolated and dangerous valley in the Icelandic mountains.

All three converge to provide a very dramatic ending to The Darkness.

Gregg Hurwitz’s writes on the cover of The Darkness ..” I dare you not to be shocked” and I do too !!

Final Thoughts 

The bottom line – I really liked the book. I thought Hulda’s character the was both interesting and well developed. Additionally, I also know that I had some of the same feelings as I approached and moved into retirement. Now, I can’t wait to move onto The Island and The Mist

Links

Author’s Website
Goodreads
Amazon

About Ragnar Jonasson

Ragnar Jonasson is author of the award winning and international bestselling Dark Iceland series.

His debut Snowblind, first in the Dark Iceland series, went to number one in the Amazon Kindle charts shortly after publication. The book was also a no. 1 Amazon Kindle bestseller in Australia. Snowblind has been a paperback bestseller in France.

Nightblind won the Dead Good Reader Award 2016 for Most Captivating Crime in Translation.

Snowblind was called a “classically crafted whodunit” by THE NEW YORK TIMES, and it was selected by The Independent as one of the best crime novels of 2015 in the UK.

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NSo over the last several days,, after finishing Steve Hamilton’s Dead Man Running, I have finished two more books. The first was Loner by Hildur Sif Thorarensen. It is her debut novel and will be book #1 in the Oslo Mysteries series.

About Hildur Sif Thorarensen.

Hildur was born in Iceland but is currently living in Norway. Although, spending most of her adult years at the University, she’s been writing ever since she was a little girl and alongside Medical studies and a Master’s in Engineering, has also taken a year in Creative Writing.

Loner was written in Iceland and published in 2016. The English version of the book was published this year. Currently, she is writing the sequel. The sequel is to be concurrently published in both Icelandic and English. The anticipated release date is to be in early 2019. I for one can not wait.

About Loner

Loner, a police procedural finds  Oslo police detectives searching for a gruesome serial killer. From Amazon

Which is worse, trying to catch a cunning killer leaving decapitated women in the woods, or trying to tame an unconventional forensic psychiatrist that seems determined to go his own way?

The Oslo autumn is creeping in with its cold spells and Homicide Detective Julia Ryland is feeling pretty content with her team of three, but when the FBI behavioral analyst, Alexander Smith, is thrust upon her, the crisp autumn air doesn’t feel as refreshing anymore. A young Icelander is found dead, an arrow piercing his heart and the extensive list of his former lovers suggests that many long nights are ahead. The murdered lothario suddenly becomes the least of their problems as headless corpses start appearing in the woods, positioned in terrifying ways and on their bodies they find messages that don’t seem to have any meaning at all.

My Thoughts

Loner reminds me of several of the police procedural that I read. It’s like Bosch where Bosch is kind of the lone wolf and there are other detectives working on the case. In this case the odd man Alexander Smith is not a detective. He instead is a forensic psychologist. That makes him even more of an outsider, who needs to prove himself. He also has just moved to Norway. His mother is Norwegian and his father American. When his parents divorced his mom mother back to Norway.Alexander often visited but now has moved back to help her with her illness

.Alexander’s boss is Julia Ryland the head detective trying to hold the team together. Other team members are Hercules and Eric each with their own problems. Together they are an interesting cast of characters. Additionally, you can add the  serial killer to the cast of interesting characters. He was a stuttering member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Loner’s plot was consistently interesting and the pace of its unfolding kept me turning the pages rapidly. The ending of the book was satisfying and left me ready for the next installment! I think Tara Sariban of Bloody Murder Podcast sums up Loner nicely…

An atmospheric thriller with a heavy dose of humour that will have you laughing and full of suspense at the same time. The surprising plot developments made it impossible to put down!

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A freezing wind pierced Erlendur’s clothes as he stood by the swings where Elias had died, and his mind roamed over the mountains and moors to another child who had once slipped from his grasp and now followed him through life like a sad shadow 

Book 27 of 2011 is Arctic Chill by Arnaldur  Indriðason and is the 7th book featuring Icelandic detective Erlendur Sveinsson and his colleagues Elínborg and Sigurður Óli. (It’s actually the 5th book in the series that has been translated.) From Wikipedia:

Arnaldur’s books have been published in twenty-six countries and have been translated into Russian, Polish, German, Greek, Danish, Catalan, English, Italian, Czech, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Chinese, Croatian, Romanian and French. Arnaldur received the Glass Key award, a literature prize for the best Nordic crime novel, in 2002 and 2003. He won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award in 2005 for the novel Silence of the Grave.

In this installment Erlender and his collegues are called on an icy January day to a garden where a body has been found: a young, dark-skinned boy Elias is frozen to the ground in a pool of his own blood.  Elias is a ten year old boy, whose mother a native of Thailand, has married an Icelandic man and moved her family Elias and his older brother Niran to Iceland. As Erlender’s team investigates the brutal murder they uncover the racism faced by immigrants to Iceland like Elias and his family. The story is a good police procedural as Erlender,  Elínborg and Sigurður Óli try to piece together the events that led to the senseless murder. But I love this series, like many others, for the devlopment of the characters. They not only have to deal with work but their personal lives too. As  Elínborg deals with a sick child,  Sigurður Óli deals with the prospect of adopting a child and Erlender deals with the death of his long time mentor, his releationship with his adult children, and the spector of   his brother whose hand Erlender lost on the moors during a freak blizzard so many years ago.

While  I do think that you can pick up any of Arnaldur’s books and enjoy them, I think they are more enjoyable if you start at the beginning! So go find Jar City and get busy you won’t regret it!

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