It's 1945: a German bomber flies over Iceland in a blizzard. Puzzlingly, there are both German and American officers on board. One of the senior German officers claims that their best chance of survival is to try to walk to the nearest farm and sets off, a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. He soon disappears into the white vastness.
THE LIVING Erlendur works nights. He's a young officer in Traffic, not yet a detective. And Reykjavik's nights are full of car crashes, robberies, drinkers and fighters. Sometimes an unexplained death.
THE LOST A homeless man Erlendur knows is found drowned. But few people care. Or when a young woman on her way home from a club vanishes. Both cases go cold.
THE SEARCHER Two lost people from two different worlds. Erlendur is not an investigator, but his instincts tell him their fates are worth pursuing. How could they be linked?
IN THE HEART OF THE NIGHT Inexorably, he is drawn into the blackness of the city's underbelly, where everyone is in the dark or on the run.
A man is making a crude leather mask with an iron spike fixed in the middle of the forehead. It is a ''death mask'', once used by Icelandic farmers to slaughter calves, and he has revenge in mind. Meanwhile, a school reunion has left Sigurdur Oli unhappy with life in the police force. While Iceland is enjoying an economic boom, his relationship is on the rocks and soon even his position in the CID is compromised after he agrees to visit a couple of blackmailers as a favour to a friend, and walks in just as a woman is beaten unconscious. When she dies, Sigurdur Oli has a murder investigation on his hands. Moving from the villas of Reykjavik''s banking elite to a sordid basement flat, Black Skies is a superb story of greed, pride and murder from one of Europe''s most successful crime writers.
Building work in an expanding Reykjavik uncovers a shallow grave. Years before, this part of the city was all open hills, and Erlendur and his team hope this is a typical Icelandic missing person scenario; perhaps someone once lost in the snow, who has lain peacefully buried for decades. Things are never that simple.
Detective Erlendur encounters memories of his troubled past in this gripping and award-winning continuation of the Reykjavík Murder Mysteries.
At a grand Reykjavík hotel the doorman has been repeatedly stabbed in the dingy basement room he called home. It is only a few days before Christmas and he was preparing to appear as Santa Claus at a children's party. The manager tries to keep the murder under wraps. A glum detective taking up residence in his hotel and an intrusive murder investigation are not what he needs.
As Erlendur quietly surveys the cast of grotesques who populate the hotel, the web of malice, greed and corruption that lies beneath its surface reveals itself. Everyone has something to hide. But most shocking is the childhood secret of the dead man who, many years before, was the most famous child singer in the country: it turns out to be a brush with stardom which would ultimately cost him everything. As Christmas Day approaches Erlendur must delve deeply into the past to find the man's killer.
Voices is a tense, atmospheric and disturbing novel from one of Europe's greatest crime writers.
One cold autumn night, a woman is found hanging from a beam in her summer cottage by Lake Thingvellir. At first sight it appears to be a straightforward case of suicide; the woman, Maria, had never recovered from the loss of her mother two years earlier and had a history of depression.
In a flat near Reykjavik city centre, a young man lies dead in a pool of blood although there are no signs of a break-in or any struggle. A vial of narcotics found in the victim's pocket among other clues soon lead Erlendur's colleagues down a trail of hidden violence, psychological brutality and of wrongs that will never be fully righted.
On an icy January day the Reykjavik police are called out to a block of flats where a body has been found in the garden: a young, dark-skinned boy, frozen to the ground in a pool of his own blood. The discovery of a stab wound in his stomach puts paid to any hope that this was a tragic accident.
THE QUICK A woman swims in a remote, milky-blue lagoon. Steam rises from the water and as it clears, a body is revealed in the ghostly light. THE DEAD Miles away, a vast aircraft hangar rises behind the perimeter fence of the US military base. A sickening thud is heard as a man''s body falls from a high platform. THE FORGOTTEN Many years before, a schoolgirl went missing. The world has forgotten her. But Erlendur has not. THE SEARCHER Erlendur Sveinsson is a newly promoted detective with a battered body, a rogue CIA operative and America''s troublesome presence in Iceland to contend with. In his spare time he investigates a cold case. He is only starting out but he is already up to his neck. ''His novels are gripping, authentic, haunting and lyrical'' - Harlan Coben
