Two Out of Three

Snare
by Lilja Sigurðardóttir
Translated by Quentin Bates
London: Orenda Books, 2017

A pair of Icelandic crime-thrillers today.

Lilja Sigurðardóttir (sister of Yrsa?) is a new ripple in the wave of Scandinavian crime-fiction writers. Her writing is definitely in the Elmore Leonard vein—taut, no nonsense, and to the point. Sonja, a single mother in Reykjavík, becomes enmeshed with a smuggling group that includes her estranged husband who is trying to wrest all parental rights away from her. Sonja also has a love interest in Agla, a woman being prosecuted in the aftermath of the 2008 Icelandic economic meltdown. Sonja also enters in a economic relationship with Bragi, an aging customs inspector who is willing to turn a blind eye to make some cash to help take care of his ailing wife. All of this leads into the next book:

Trap
by Lilja Sigurðardóttir
Translated by Quentin Bates
London: Orenda Books, 2018

Taking up where Snare left off, Trap gives us the further adventures of Sonja and Agla, as both the smuggling and financial capers ratchet up in intensity. The mastermind of the smuggling ring, Mr. José, takes a special interest in Sonja, and Agla plans the biggest fraud yet to cover-up the smaller ones that she had been perpetuating. All of this is well and good, although the money laundering schemes are fairly abstruse and the smuggling incidents begin to lose appeal after the third or fourth iteration. There is also a third book in the series, Cage, which has just been released. It leaves the drug smuggling behind and focuses on the banking shenanigans. I might skip that one.

The translator for all three of these books is Quentin Bates, who is also a writer of Icelandic crime fiction. It is a serviceable translation but, like the rest of Bates’ work, unexceptional.

Black-out

An Ari Thór Thriller
By Ragnar Jonasson
Translated by Quentin Bates

This book, written in 2011, was published in English in 2018. It was the only one of Ragnar’s ‘Dark Iceland’ mysteries to have escaped my purview. Set in during the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in 2010, the post-crash economy of Iceland is just starting to pick up when a laborer is found murdered at a remote farmhouse which was undergoing renovations. Ari Thór and his sidekick Tómas investigate the case while Ísrún, a news journalist from Reykjavík, drives up to Akureyri to cover the situation for televison.

This is one of Ragnar’s better efforts, the plot is complex, but not to the point of confusion. Many of the characters have flashbacks as the scope of the underlying cause of the crime becomes revealed. There is a bang-up ending, perhaps a little too neat, but satisfactory. It does take place in the summer, however, so the weather is actually nice in the North, in contrast to the volcanic ash and pollution from Eyjafjallajokull. At less than 250 pages it is a good vacation read.

The translation by Bates is odd: lifeless, awkward phrasing, British usage, and even a few typos. This isn’t fine literature, but a decent translation could have made it better.

Marginal recommendation.

Two Icelandic Thrillers

Snowblind
A Thriller
By Ragnar Jónasson
Translated by Quentin Bates
New York: Minotaur Books 2017

Yet another Icelandic mystery series! I went into this one blind—I found it at the library under the catalog heading “Icelandic.” I ordered it with some other titles and when I got it I plowed through it in a day—a breezy read—it would be a perfect airport book. It is set during the Kreppa of 2008-2009 but almost all of the action takes place in Siglufjörður, a small town on the northern coast of Iceland. Ari Thór Arason, a rookie police officer, gets his first taste of solving crime in a close-knit community with its share of secrets. Almost every character gets a complete back-story. This made for a complicated story, almost fiddly at times, but it is all resolved at the end, although the author couldn't finish without a couple of “cheats.”

When I read the authors bio I wasn’t surprised to learn that the author had translated fourteen Agatha Christie novels into Icelandic! If you are a fan of Agatha, you might get a kick out of this. If you aren’t, this might be a little stodgy; it really is old-fashioned. The writing, while competent, is stiff. The translator is an English writer of Icelandic mysteries as well; the work I've read of his wasn’t exactly great literature either.

The Undesired
A Thriller
By Yrsa Sigurðardóttir
Translated by Victoria Cribb
New York: Minotaur Books 2015

I've reviewed Yrsa before, those books had the lawyer/investigator Þóra Guðmundsdóttir as the protagonist. This book is a stand-alone, the plot is driven by the actions of one Oðin Hafsteinsson, a mid-level bureaucrat at the Icelandic State Supervisory Agency. He had recently started this new job as a way to deal with the death of his ex-wife; he has assumed custody of his 11 year old daughter and needs a more regular schedule. His work  is boring until the death of a co-worker thrusts him into case concerning the activities of a  group home/reform school that had closed forty years earlier.

As “thrillers” go, this one is pretty tepid, and it takes its own sweet time to develop as the story shifts between the past and present.  While it is set in Iceland, at first there is little other than the character names to give it a Nordic atmosphere. Toward the end of the book, however, it does reveal a certain “Icelandic-ness” as it picks up speed and expertly comes to its disturbing conclusion. This is the best book of Yrsa’s that I’ve read but, as I mentioned, you have to make a real effort to stick with it to the end. The translation is pretty British, almost to the point of being a distraction at times, but serviceable.

The Darkness

A Thriller
By Ragnar Jónasson
Translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb
Minotaur Books, 2018

Ragnar is one of the “new generation” of Icelandic mystery writers. I’ve read and reviewed a couple of his books before passing on his third book, which I tried to read but couldn’t finish. This book, his fourth, is part of a new series featuring Hulda Hermannsdóttir, a police investigator working out of Reykjavík. Hulga is nearing retirement and is given the opportunity to work on one more cold-case before she leaves the force. She picks up on the case of a Russian woman who was found dead on the southern coast of Iceland that had never been given a proper investigation. Initially ruled a suicide, Hulga quickly discovers irregularities in the case and begins to ruffle feathers as she proceeds in her inquiries.

This is a much better book than Ragnar’s previous ones. The coherent plot, lots of local color, good usage of foreshadowing and a doozy of an ending make this a novel worth seeking out. Victoria Cribb’s translation is also better than the previous ones by Quentin Bates, which might have also contributed to its readability.

Rupture

An Ari Thór thriller by Ragnar Jónasson

Minotaur Books 2019
Translated from the Icelandic by Quentin Bates

This title slipped past me last year. Ragnar had actually written it earlier (2012) than some of his previously published titles in English. He is on a roll these days, his serviceable mysteries (this is not a thriller in any sense of the definition) keep on coming with five titles in the Ari Thór series and three of the Hulda stories so far. I’ve reviewed most of them here.

This is a “family and friends” type of mystery, where relationships are not what they seem, even after sixty years. The three main plot threads concern a family history puzzle triggered by an old photograph, a revenge plot for an accidental killing, and the efforts of a television reporter trying to tie members of the current Icelandic parliament to murders related to the revenge. Ari Thór, nominally the protagonist, is stuck in Siglufjörður, a small town on the North coast of Iceland, due to a quarantine caused by the death of a tourist who brought hemorrhagic fever to the area. Ísrún, the reporter, contacts Ari for information on the epidemic and becomes intrigued by Ari’s story of an extended family in the mid-1950s who once lived on a remote farm where one of the women died from poison. Ísrún is also covering a stolen baby story which may be related to a hit-and-run death and a brutal killing three years previously.

The writing is good and the different plot lines don’t get confusing. There is a fair amount of Icelandic scenery, both in the north and in Reykjavík. Rupture just didn’t grab me; I think Ragnar’s later Hulda novels are better.

Nightblind

A Thriller
By Ragnar Jónasson
Translated by Quentin Bates
Minotaur Books, 2016

This is a follow-up to Jónasson’s Snowblind, which introduced the reluctant policeman Arí Thor, who now finds himself involved involved in an investigation of an ambush-style shooting of one of his fellow officers in the remote Northern Icelandic city of Siglufjörður.  Like the earlier book, I found its noir-ish affectations to be a little creaky; it may have suffered in translation.

This is “Icelandic light” crime fiction; all the tropes are there (dark family secrets, visits with pensioners, cold and darkness) but while it was competent, I didn’t find it engrossing. Arí Thor isn’t the most compelling detective, and Tómas, his old partner who returns from Reykjavík to aid in the investigation, isn’t any livelier. There is at least one more book in this series forthcoming, Blackout, but I think I’ll probably pass on that one.