Officer
Erlendur from the police in Reykjavík is investigating the murder of a lorry
driver. It seems a trivial case of robbery attempt gone badly, but the
investigations take him farther, in the past of the victim.
The
image that the author gives of Iceland is disturbing and gloomy. In a dark and
rainy autumn, Erlendur and his colleagues gather evidence, interrogate and dig,
sometimes literally, until a story of rapes, suicides and deadly diseases
emerges.
The
same gloom is also present in the subplot involving Erlendur’s daughter, Eva
Lind, and a girl who inexplicably disappears immediately after her wedding.
Here we are dealing with drugs and abuse.
Immersed
in this setting, which is anything but happy, the reader is captured by the
story and tries to follow the reasoning of the protagonist in getting away with
an extremely intricate case, one of those that in reality, if they were ever
resolved, would take months if not years of investigation. Here the author is
good at giving information in small pieces and, when the reader believes they
have understood something, he distracts them with a twist. And, despite the
great amount of details and the many names not easy to remember, you can still
easily follow the story until its conclusion.
Here,
if I have to find something negative in this book this is the ending, both the
one of the case and the brief epilogue. The former is perhaps a bit too
dramatic (I don’t explain why to avoid spoilers). The latter, in the way it is
shown, is a little too hasty. It seems almost to read the sentences written at
the end of a film telling what happened next to the characters, followed by the
classic short scene after the credits.
A note: despite being defined a thriller on the cover, this book is actually a mystery.
A note: despite being defined a thriller on the cover, this book is actually a mystery.
Jar City on Amazon.
No comments:
Post a Comment