Finished
66° North by
Michael Ridpath, 2nd in his Fire & Ice police procedural mystery series starring Magnus Jonson aka Magnús Ragnarsson, Intrepid Transplanted Bi-National Icelandic-American Boston-Raised Reykjavík-Resident Expat Cop.
Apparently these might have a bit of a theme to them, with the saga and literature callbacks, and once again there's an old saga involved and the particular literary focus of this one is Icelandic Nobel Prize winning author Halldór Laxness'
Independent People (which I read a really long time ago and wouldn't have remembered all that well without the useful refresher that this book gives), which thematically ties into the ostensible plot backdrop of the Icelandic economic crash, constrasting the supposedly simple idealized life of the traditional Icelandic farmer with the slick social-climbing jetsetting Viking Raiders of modern times who led him astray, while depicting the underlying complexity and complications of both, which are neither wholly good or bad.
This one has a mildly unusual tripartite mystery structure, where two strands are easy to link up, but the connections of the third to the main case (or even the main narrative) are rather unobvious at first, but shows things that actually resonate strongly with the other threads. It's also part psychological thriller (though in a somewhat "lite" sense), because for several parts of it, you know exactly whodunnit and why, and the real question is who's actually going to pay the price for it when it all finally comes out. Despite a greater amount of switching between apparently disjointed narrative and timeline strands than in #1, that technique actually hung together better in #2 since it was mostly happening in Iceland and England and it felt more organic to go back and forth within the settings that it did, than all the intrusive-seeming Boston bits in #1.
In addition to the actual core mystery, which plays around with Icelandic society and national and international reactions to Iceland's part in the financial disasters of the late 2000s, there's an ongoing strand of personal mystery as Magnus begins looking into certain surprising revelations about his early home life made in #1, which will apparently form a B-plot continuing throughout the series as he tries to solve his father's long-ago murder, which was part of the impetus for his becoming a cop in the first place. And there's some nice relationship building bits with his supporting cast of slightly eccentric colleagues, love interest, and estranged family on both sides of the pond.
Medium recommend if you think you might be interested in a Nordic Noir series by an Englishman (who's gotten praise for it in the Icelandic newspapers) writing from a semi-Icelandic perspective and incorporating significant pieces of ancient and modern Icelandic culture in it. It's also got a pretty decent theme going on about the myriad ways in which people cope after stuff just begins to balloon and spiral out of control, and the choices they make as a result, and the lingering effects of crime, both physical and financial, on both the criminals and their victims, and the sometimes thin dividing line between those categories.
As before, there's an author's note in the back, and he's put up a
gallery of photos of the locations used on his website, although there's no research/influences essay this time around. It turns out that for whatever reason, #3 & #4 aren't available in North America as e-books (although technically the same publisher handles them as for the UK), but happily, one of the local libraries has them in as import paperbacks, so I know what I'm picking up the next time I go downtown.