Inspector Erlandur, the main character in Arnaldur Indridason's Icelandic police series, has taken some time off. While he's away, one of his team, Sigurdur Óli, never the most dedicated of crimefighters, takes the spotlight.
Sigurdur Óli has a friend who shocks the detective by revealing his wife-swapping behavior, then asks Sigurdur Óli to talk to a husband-and-wife amateur team of blackmailers and get them to knock it off. But when Sigurdur Óli goes to talk to them, he finds the woman has been beaten nearly to death and her home trashed. And Sigurdur Óli nearly gets his own head bashed in before the assailant takes to his heels. In the ensuing investigation, Sigurdur Óli does not quite reveal all the facts - trying to protect his friend, of course - to his colleagues and refuses to recuse himself from the case. The reader can safely trust that his failure to do so will come back to bite him in the derrière.
While trying to track down the assailant, a homeless man, Andres, makes Sigurdur Óli the object of some mysterious declarations and sends the policeman a soundless 12-second filmstrip that shows a naked and terrified young boy. Sigurdur Óli can never pin down the constantly-in-motion Andres long enough to get direct answers, but then, even if he could, Andres's mental condition and habitually drunken state are not likely to improve his coherence. While Sigurdur Óli wrestles with these puzzles, he must also grapple with mounting personal issues including the break up of his long-term relationship and the revelation that his father has prostate cancer.
Throughout this series, Sigurdur Óli has never been a sympathetic character, and the same is true in this book. He is cold, cynical, callous, and profoundly snobbish. By book's end, the reader still may not like this character, but there will be dawning respect as his personal crises do cause Sigurdur Óli to spend some time in self-examination, and to find himself wanting -- and wanting to be better. In past books Sigurdur Óli has not been a hardworking detective, and his self-absorption and superior attitude have made him insensitive to nuances in witness statements. In BLACK SKIES, his sudden solitude makes him more willing to put in the hours: long, dull, thankless hours of legwork. His introspection awakens in him a new awareness that the people around him are people, not stereotypes. And his contact with the pitiful, broken Andres helps him toward a better understanding of why Sigurdur Óli is the way he is. As bleak as this book is - and its title does it justice - as long as a character like Sigurdur Óli can begin finding greater humanity in himself, there is hope for us all. RECOMMENDED but with the added caution that this book is at times so bleak that reading it in one sitting is not advised. Walk away a time or two, and maintain perspective.
Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles, Vol. II, is a solid follow up to the debut collection of Western short stories. The opening story, Origin of White Deer, is a terrific introduction to the young Cash and lays the foundation for the more mature hero in the other stories. The final story, Reflections in a Glass of Maryland Rye (first published here courtesy of author Edward A. Grainger), is a particularly fine tale, a dark episode that reveals a more human, more fallible Cash, but a man to whom the reader can still relate. Only one Gideon Miles story in this volume, sadly, but it's a dandy. Fans of tales of western justice won't go wrong by saddling up and riding with Laramie and Miles.
The most recent installment in Arnaldur Indriðason's Erlandur series, Hypothermia, may well be the best book in an already fine series. The theme running throughout the series, that of being lost and in search of, is beautifully rendered as Erlandur studies a clear cut case of suicide while following up on a pair of decades-old missing persons cases. The suicide case fascinates Erlandur: the victim was consumed by the possibility of communicating with the dead; she had dreams and visions of the dead mother to whom she was unusually close. The two cold cases are particularly poignant, as both of the missing persons were young people and their families are dead or dying without knowing what ever became of their loved ones. As always, the chill beauty of Iceland stands as backdrop to a story grim but gentle.
SYNOPSIS: Near Reykjavik, a skeleton is found in a lakebed, a skeleton tied to a Soviet-era "listening device." Inspector Erlandur also wants to look into the case of a man who went missing in the late 1960s, leaving behind a broken-hearted fiancee and a brand-new Ford Falcon with a missing hubcap. And for those who would ask this question first, yes, the draining lake was a real phenomenon.
REVIEW: Each time I begin an Arnaldur book (in Iceland they pretty much go by first names) I question why? The ambiance is always one of dreary bleakness, the people cold and stiff with each other. The pacing is slow and melancholic. But by the end of each of his previous books, Arnaldur had turned my head and heart completely over. And he's done it again.
Absolutely this book can be defined as a mystery. I have seen Arnaldur's stories described as macabre thrillers. That's nonsense. These are gentle mysteries, with passion at the core. Not cozies, never cozies. Nothing, especially not the characterization, is ever so neat and tidy as in a cozy. And this book, The Draining Lake, is more than a mystery. It's a love story. And as with all the best love stories, it's about loss.
Loss echoes loss throughout the book. As Erlandur investigates his two cases, the missing man and the skeleton in the lake, the author also unfolds to the reader a story in the East Germany of the Cold War era, a story of enthusiastic young socialists, of "interactive surveillance," of promising futures, of family, and of rank betrayal. The author never cheats mystery buffs by having the cases solved by information they lack; if anything, the reader gets more information than Erlandur and his team. The denouement is wrenching because it not only furthers the theme of loss, but also demonstrates the haunting nature of love. It is through these themes that the story becomes more than an Icelandic mystery, it becomes an acknowledgment of a universal human experience.
Erlandur's character may be best defined by an event that occurred in his youth, a story given in detail in a prior book, when his brother was lost in a snowstorm and was never found. Erlandur consumes books of survivors' stories and spends his holidays in the countryside where his brother was lost. Erlandur's daughter, Eva Lind, is lost again to him, maybe forever this time as she has once more sunk into the hell that is the life of a junkie. This time Erlandur refuses to try to find and rescue her; he can't bear to bring her home again only to lose her again. That cycle of recovery and loss is more than he can bear. This leads to a scene between Erlandur and his long-estranged son, in which Erlandur's abandonment of his children when they were young depicts just how tragic that event was for Eva Lind. The scene is no less powerful for the spare prose:
'I'll try to talk to her,' Sindri said. 'But what I really think is that she's waiting for you to come and rescue her. I think she's on her last legs. She's often been bad, but I've never seen her like that before.'
'Why did she cut her hair?' Erlandur asked. 'When she was twelve.'
'Someone touched her and stroked her hair and talked dirty to her,' Sindri said.
He said this straightforwardly, as if he could search his memory for such incidents and find a whole hoard of them.
The losses keep mounting. One of Erlandur's assistants, Sigurdur Oli, a character with whom I felt no kinship in prior books, becomes deeply sympathetic as he must deal with the constant phone calls from a man who feels responsible for the death of the man's wife and child only because he asked his wife to buy strawberries on her way home. She and the child were struck by an out-of-control vehicle and the man, nameless throughout, cannot shake the burden of culpability. Sigurdur Oli takes the calls at all hours, in all places, and gives reassurance while begging the obviously suicidal man to seek professional help. The calls become progressively desperate. And then Sigurdur Oli and his beloved Bergthora experience their own loss.
All of these are modern echoes of the losses depicted in the two cases. In one instance a woman is herself lost, as she never comes to terms with the disappearance of her fiancee, her one love, never knowing what became of him or whether he might even still be alive. In the other case, a young man's love is not only stolen from him by betrayal, but his future, his family, and eventually his raison d'etre are drained from him. Loss is a slowly draining lake; Arnaldur chose an apt metaphor.
If you like sharply defined characters who will never surprise you from book to book, this may not be the story for you. You cannot read one Erlandur book and think you know him. Even Arnaldur Indridason admits he does not fully understand this character. If your taste runs to perky chick-lit, skip this book. Ditto gorey thrillers and forensic labyrinths. If, however, you enjoy the patient unravelling of knitted puzzles, if you are willing to invest your emotions in characters who may not be willing to participate in neatly-clipped endings, who may not even be thoroughly likeable; if you can get beyond the odd feel of Icelandic names to the humanity they represent, you may find it worthwhile to pick up the Erlandur books and explore the nature of loss, how it ripples across the surface of our lives, and how ignorant we often are of what happens below that surface.
Should you care to investigate more about the Erlandur books, the first one published in the USA was Jar City, which was also made into a film. Here's the trailer:
