Crime fiction set in Reykjavik – Ragnar Jónasson and PM Katrín Jakobsdottír

Submitted: 14th August 2023

Reykjavik by Ragnar Jónasson and PM Katrín Jakobsdottír

Crime fiction set in Videy island and Reykjvaik – with a 30 year mystery at its core – written by the King of Icelandic Crime Fiction and the Prime Minister of Iceland. What a pairing!

As a result, the novel has a bit of both of their backgrounds – the Agatha Christie mystery on an island and the politics of Iceland in 1956 and 1986.

In 1956 15 year old Lara takes a summer job on Videy, a small island off Reykjavik. The Oskarssons, the wealthy couple she worked for, were the only people residing on the island. Lara’s parents however, become concerned when she did not make her weekly call home…..

BookTrail the locations in Reykjavik

Boarding Pass Information : Reykjavik

Destination : Reykjavik, Island of Videy

Author guide: Jane Johnson

Genre: crime fiction

Food and drink to accompany: Something caughts in Faxafloi Bay

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BookTrail the locations in Reykjavik

A novel to transport you to an island off Iceland

BookTrail the locations in Reykjavik

The setting attracted me to this one. An island off the coast of Iceland where a 15 year old girl goes to work only never to be seen again. She leaves her parents in Reykjavik to head to work for the island’s only inhabitants. Her new bosses are a wealthy couple with secrets to hide it would seem. Kristjan is the officer on the case and 30 years after the events, he is troubled with having never solved it.

Kristjan was hampered throughout the investigation. As you read, you clearly pick up that there is a veil of mystery over everything and everyone. It was a huge case but no one saw anything, knew anything or wanted anything to do with it. Valur was a journalist on the case at the time and goes out on a limb to look at the case himself. Well, you know that’s not going to be a good idea….His sister Sunna is faced with a hell of a dilemna and the rest of the story looks at her and what she finds out.

Although this is quite a slow read, a gently paced police procedural rather than a thriler, it felt very like the investigation undertaken in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for its complexity and twists. There’ a definate political background to this and it really bumped up the time and place for me. I learned a lot about Iceland and their celebrations as well as Covid and the growing political problems in the world.

It’s a shadow- fuelled read shrounded in mystery and the sense that something really is odd in this community. The island gives the mystery an extra edge and adds more suspicion to the plot

Hope there’s more of this kind of colloboration!