Icelandic crime novelists face a peculiar challenge; the murder rate in Iceland is so low that during some years not one single murder has taken place there. If you are setting your murder mysteries in Iceland you are forced to be extremely creative.
The Icelandic novelist Ragnar Jonasson's book "The Darkness" is a murder mystery but it took some serious detective work to turn what had been a suspicious death written off as a suicide into an unsolved homicide. Jonasson's sleuth is a long-serving police detective who has been treated disrespectfully throughout her career. When Hilde is informed by her boss that she might as well retire early because he has already assigned her office to another police officer she decides to look into one more cold case before she heads into retirement if only to spite her boss.
Hilde discovers that the young immigrant woman who supposedly killed herself because she was not being allowed to stay in Iceland had actually been murdered. Her search for the killer places her in a perilous position. The author called in to us from Iceland to do this interview. Remember his name. He writes brilliantly. And this book is the first in a trilogy. The next two books are prequels and will take us back to Hilde's early career as a detective.
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