Finished
Frozen Assets by
Quentin Bates (marketed as
Frozen Out in the US and another Canada-available edition, confusingly), 1st in his police procedural series starring Gunnhildur Gísladóttir, Intrepid Icelandic Small Town Cop Who Sometimes Investigates Big City Crime.
I bought this a while back when it was one of Soho's $1.99 specials, but didn't get around to reading it until a couple of days ago when I realized that not only had the two tie-in novellas dropped to just 99 cents (they were something like $3 a pop when I bought the 1st-in-series), but #4, which is out from a different (non-couponable) publisher than #2 & #3, was also marked down to $4.99 and not in any of the local libraries thus far, and I could get them with 10x bonus points during the weekend promo. TBH, I'd have probably just gone ahead and bought them anyway since I'm interested in reading things in the setting to begin with, and checking to see that the author had reasonably decent prose and plotting was just a formality.
Anyway, this is the 2nd series I've tried with Icelandic characters in Nordic Noir-style novels written by Englishmen (I think they may be the only two series of such existing), so comparisons with Michael Ridpath's Fire & Ice series are inevitable. Overall, this came off as a little more obvious and less subtle in its character work.
One of the things that I liked about the Fire & Ice books is that while US-raised Icelander Magnus has his cowboy cop moments, he's balanced by nay-saying superiors and professional opponents who are competent and non-venal, and oppose more because they genuinely think that he's on the wrong investigative path and needlessly wasting limited resources and should be looking in the other direction, or there really are toes he'd be seriously stepping on and disrupting in a closed community that would have to live with the aftereffects and should tread more carefully while continuing his path, and less because they're mildly bad at their jobs, obstructionist for the sake of petty power-hoarding, or trying to rank-climb and playing politics. Officer Gunnhildur has a cruder supporting cast to work with, and the actual villains of the piece are also drawn in broader strokes, making for a different and more cartoonily thriller-ish, but still fairly enjoyable sort of storytelling.
This story was centred around Iceland's aluminum processing business, made possible by their cheap electricity, and set just prior to the economic crisis. It also plays the story from multiple angles, introducing a complementary narrative of gossip blogging which sort of meta-comments on the story as it goes along, and POVs from the sides of the baddies and people who just kind of get caught up in their actions as well. It's interesting to see the attitudes of the high-flying jetset just getting used to all their sudden wealth and influence before the bubble bursts and grounds them, and how it all gets viewed in the popular gossip rags.
Medium-light recommend if you think you might be into Nordic stories about insiders, as told by outsiders. The plot reasoning for the whodunnit seemed a little convoluted in a "why would you bother to go to this much trouble" sort of way (but then I often think that about many mysteries), but otherwise held together decently. And the supporting cast for future novels (if they weren't meant to be one-offs instead of recurring characters) were set up well enough, and the Icelandic cultural bits were incorporated in a reasonable fashion, though they didn't quite have the depth and smoothness of the Ridpath books. Though to be fair, this seems to be Bates' debut novel and Ridpath had over a decade's experience writing legal and financial crime thrillers before he started Fire & Ice, so this is perfectly cromulent for a first effort and hopefully the series just gets better from here.
