Iceland’s most successful author has teamed up with the country’s prime minister to write a mystery/crime thriller that’s one of the best books I’ve read in quite a while.
Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson
REYKJAVIK. By Ranger Jonasson and Katrin Jakobsdottir. Minotaur Books. 363 pages. $19, paperback.
It’s 1956, and Kristjan Krisjtansson, a rookie policeman from Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, arrives by boat on the island of Videy, not far off the coast. He has been sent to look into the disappearance of Lara, a 15-year-old girl who was living and working on the island for the summer. Her parents in Reykjavik haven’t received her usual phone call this weekend, and they are concerned.
The young policeman thinks something’s not quite right when he talks to the couple who had hired Lara as their maid for the summer. They say that she abruptly announced that she was breaking her contract, packed up her belongings and left. They have no idea how she traveled or who might have taken her by boat. They seem indifferent.
The problem is, neither her parents nor anyone else has heard from her. And by all accounts, she’d been enjoying her summer job.
Her employers, Ottar and Olof, a prominent Reykjavik couple living on the island for the summer, shrug her disappearance off as typical teenage behavior. While Kristjan, the young policeman, is still at Ottar and Olof’s house, frustrated, he gets a call on their phone from a higher-up at the police department, telling him to stop troubling the couple. They are upstanding people. Leave them alone, he says. Kristjan complies, but he can’t help but think the case is not over.
Lara is never heard from again. Her body isn’t found on the island or in the water. There’s talk of suicide, but it doesn’t add up: Why would she have packed up all her belongings?
Her parents grow frantic, and the story becomes a national sensation in the press,
On the 10th anniversary of Lara’s disappearance, the continuing mystery is revisited in the news. A reporter interviews Kristjan, now a seasoned policeman. Kristjan doesn’t tell the reporter how much he is still haunted by Lara’s disappearance, how he feels guilty every single day, worried that he didn’t do all that he could have.
Then on the 20th anniversary, another journalist wants a story, and Kristjan, at the behest of his superiors, obliges, however unwillingly. At this point, he’d rather forget the whole thing – if only he could.
Then the authors take us to 1986, the 30th anniversary of Lara’s disappearance, and the story intensifies. An ambitious young reporter, Valur Robertsson, is working hard at a weekly tabloid newspaper, aiming to make a name for himself and eventually be a top-notch investigative reporter on a leading newspaper.
Valur wasn’t even born when Lara disappeared, but as he and his sister grew up, the story was a staple of Icelandic culture, the nation’s most famous unsolved case. He talks his editor into letting him do an investigative series on Lara, and it has already sold a lot of newspapers. Now he’s looking for something big, something new, to end the series in style.
As Valur and eventually his sister, Sunna, probe more deeply into Lara’s disappearance, the tension mounts. It seems that someone will go to great lengths to keep the mystery from being solved.
The authors dedicate this book to Agatha Christie, “who inspired our love of detective stories.” The carefully plotted, well-written, spellbinding story they have produced would no doubt make Dame Agatha proud.
Ragnar Jonasson is an internationally successful mystery writer. He’s also a former TV newsman. Katrin Jakobsdottir, Iceland’s prime minister since 2017, knows the country’s power structure and how things work. Together, this team has produced an outstanding mystery that slowly and carefully builds to a surprising yet satisfying ending.
As a bonus, readers get a good look at Icelandic life and culture in the latter half of the 20th century.