Another Kind of Doll Story

The Girl By the Bridge
A Detective Konráð Novel

By Arnaldur Indriðason
Translated by Philip Roughton
Minotaur Books, 2023

It was October, 2018. The Weaver and I were heading into Reykjavík from the airport when I spotted an electronic billboard touting Stulkan hjá brúnní, the latest title from Iceland’s most renown mystery writer. It wasn’t until this year that I was able to read it in translation.

It was worth the wait.

The novel begins on the small bridge over Tjörnin, the pond in the center of Reykjavik, a place where I have walked dozens of times. It is 1961 and a young man spies a doll in the water at the pond’s edge. He investigates further and finds the body of a girl. The narrative jumps to a birthday party a few weeks later where we are introduced to Eygló, a 12 year-old girl with psychic abilities, who has an encounter with an apparition of another girl who mysteriously disappears after saying “I lost her.”

Flash-forward nearly sixty years and we find retired Detective Konrád who is called upon to conduct an informal search for the granddaughter of a notable Icelandic couple. The story takes off from there, with the usual mix of druggies and lowlife who are somehow tied into the death of the girl who was found at the bridge. Eygló reappears with information about the dead girl. Konrád’s back story is nicely integrated into the plot, I’m looking forward to seeing how the long arc of that story develops. In a pleasant deviation from the usual dectective novels, Konrád does not develop a love interest (perhaps because he's in his seventies.)

This is solid writing, terse, with a good translation by Roughton. Lots of local references makes it fun to read if you’ve spent time walking the streets of Reykjavík (if so, have a map handy when you read this). All of that said, as with most of Arnaldur’s novels, there are lots of interviews with elderly witnesses, not exactly thriller material. Multi-generational cover-ups are a recurring theme of Arnaldur’s books. There are three more books in the series yet to be translated.

I’ve reviewed most of Arnaldur’s translated output over a time span which matches this blog’s existence exactly. During that time he’s sold millions of books while all I have this goofy blog with its 20-30 daily visitors! Recommended.