Jar City

It's not just revenge.

Murder of any sort is best eaten cold. And it's hard to imagine a colder, bleaker, darker setting than Reykjavík, Iceland, in the winter.

Detective Erlandur, the hero of Arnaldur Indridason's series, seems a reflection of his environment: quiet, cold, rugged...unforgiving, but with a volcanic fire and warmth that simmers underneath and sometimes breaks through. He has long been alone, but is only recently lonely. Long divorced, the young children he abandoned have found him. Now grown up, they struggle with addictions brought on by their own loniliness and abandonment and Erlandur longs to do right by them, but is unsure how. He is an ill equipped workaholic, who struggles with his own depression and is morosely obsessed with the stories of those accidentally killed by exposure.

Erlandur's work is assisted by his partner, Sigurdur Oli, a family man who is proud of having studied police work in America. They work together well, though Sigurdur Oli's wife is concerned about Erlandur's lack of relationships. Elinborg is a young, idealistic female detective, who sometimes becomes emotionally connected to the investigation. Miriam Brieme is Erlandur's former mentor, now retired, but lonely and rich with knowledge of old cases. She can pester Erlandur, still trying to teach him, and he resists her, perhaps because he knows he is doomed to follow in her footsteps if his emotional life remains closed.

Indridason's murders are clever and his investigations grow like a trees from a seed. They branch out in many directions, sometimes branching again and again before they seemingly lead to dead ends...or converge in a tightly woven revelation. No false trail is uninteresting because the characters are rich and nuanced, likely to lie and mislead investigators for personal reasons, which simply trigges closer investigation and exposure. Probing into the people's secrets weighs on the team and feeds Erlandur's own need to find positive human connection, and to reflect on and make sense of his own life and depression.

In Jar City, as the investigation leads the team to dredge up witnesses and victims of crimes that may have happened thirty years in the past, they are forced to ruminate on the long arm of crime, how it effects people far outside of the immediate victim, even years after the original crime was commited. It is also concerned with privacy, and the way information can inadvertently be obtained through modern technology, particularly genetic databases. It makes us ponder how connected we are to each other, even apparent strangers, for our lives do have tremendous impact on those around us.

While Jar City (also published under the title Tainted Blood) is the starting point of the series (at least in English translation) the books can be read and enjoyed in any order. I read Hypothermia first, really enjoyed it, and didn't even realize it was in a series until after the fact.

The series has won mutiple crime writing awards.