Reykjavik Nights

In my last blog I wrote about discarding crime novels. Here is one that survived the cull. In fact Arnaldur Indridason is one of my favourite writers and I had been saving his latest. I won’t be recycling it via the charity shop either.

Reykjavik Nights (2015) takes us back to the very beginning of Erlendur’s career when, not yet a detective, he is a young policeman on night duty. We’re much closer in time to the defining tragedy of his life: the disappearance of his younger brother when the boys became separated from their father in a snow storm. It’s no surprise that he becomes fascinated by cases involving missing people. A woman on her way home from a night club vanishes. Around the same time a tramp known to Elendur is found drowned in a pond on waste land. Both cases have gone cold and Erlendur follows them up in his spare time, suspecting they are connected. It’s an engrossing read, beautifully paced, richly textured, with something of the haunting melancholy of those long Icelandic nights. A real treat.