As Solid a Mystery That You Will Ever Read

books:


	• Silence of the Grave (Reykjavik Murder Mysteries, No. 2) Arnaldur Indridason Picador, 2007 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 17 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Family Values

The skeleton of a hand sticks out of the soil. Erlendur, a detective in Reykjavík, Iceland, leads a team to unearth the rest of the body which appears to have been buried for about sixty years. While the investigation goes on we are introduced, through flashbacks, to a family living in the period of WWII. This family is visited by such horrible domestic violence, that I occasionally put the book down, and had to take a breather from it. While this part of the plot keeps recurring we follow Detective Erlandur's life that includes members of his own dysfunctional family. The attempt to discover the identity of the skeleton becomes secondary to the author's intent of shocking us into understanding the psychological and physical tragedy that results from the behavior of people unable to cope with life. Rare is the character in this bleak novel who doesn't have personal demons affecting his or her life.

I am often amused by some Amazon reviewers who downgrade a novel because they can't identify with any of the characters in a book. If you have a view that a work of literature must be populated with happy heroes, then this book is not for you. In my opinion this is an amazing story. It provides the reader with an investigation into both a murder, and the minds and souls of some disturbed people.

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As Solid a Mystery That You Will Ever Read

One of the things you have to take for granted when reading this story is that the translator is English and some of the idioms used by the characters may seem quaint. Maybe that's the way Icelanders are, but that is a small price to pay to be able to read this novel. Anyone who attempts to read this book without first reading "Jar City" will be doing themselves a great disservice. It's important to read an author like Arnaldur in order because each novel unraps the main character like you would an artichoke. You need to see each petal as it's revealed by the author.

The story is intriguing for the way Arnaldur lets it unfold. It begins like a lot of "Cold Cases" or "CSIs". A body is found at a construction site. The body is at least fifty years old and there's no way to tell if it's a murder or an old graveyard. So where do you start? Well you find someone who knows how to excavate a body without destroying all the forensic evidence. While the body is being exhumed, you go looking for people who would have been in the area fifty years ago.

The story is made easier in that the land had been an area for summer housing for many years, but was now becoming part of a suburban estate.
So that little has disturbed the area over the last fifty years. On the other hand, most if not all the people who lived there then, are dead.

Intertwined within the story of the body, is a second story that explains little by little what led up to the burial of the body. At the same time, Inspector Erlendur (who reminds me a lot of Inspector Rebus) is dealing with his own devils. He walked out on his wife, daughter and son when the children were little and has had little contact with them since. His daughter has been living on the streets, and doing what junkies do to get drugs, she is pregnant and in no shape to have a child. Erlendur is also dredging up a horror from his past, that in some ways mirrors the main story relating to the buried body.

The ending is something you cannot guess, and best of all it is not the result of the author throwing 'red herrings' in front of us to conceal what happens. A great read, and I'm looking forward to the three books that follow this one.

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A great sequel to "Jar City"

I greatly enjoyed reading this sequel to "Jar City!" I am a big fan of Henning Mankell's novels, but it was thrilling to discover Arnaldur Indridason! His writing kept me at the "edge of my seat;" his stories are gripping and also provide psychological depth to his characters. Just as Mankell does with Sweden, Arnaldur gives the reader some insight into Icelandic society.
I can't wait to read Arnaldur's future novels!

a good read

I read "Silence of the Grave" and am now reading Indridason's book "Jar City." I'm enjoying both of them. I've never been to Reykjavik, but the author provides a good description of the city. The main character in both books is Inspector Erlendur, who has got plenty of problems of his own (ran out on his wife and 2 kids when they were young, the kids want little or nothing to do with him now. His daughter is a drug addict, etc.) Erlendur is the gritty, bulldog detective type who catches the few murders that are committed in Iceland. While my favorite detective is Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov (Stuart Kaminsky), Erlendur's character is well written. I look forward to reading future Indridason books.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger Award

Inspector Erlendur returns in this gripping Icelandic thriller When a skeleton is discovered half-buried in a construction site outside of Reykjavík, Inspector Erlendur finds himself knee-deep in both a crime scene and an archeological dig. Bone by bone, the body is unearthed, and the brutalizing history of a family who lived near the building site comes to light along with it. Was the skeleton a man or a woman, a victim or a killer, and is this a simple case of murder or a long-concealed act of justice? As Erlendur tries to crack this cold case, he must also save his drug-addicted daughter from self destruction and somehow glue his hopelessly fractured family back together.

Like the chilly Nordic mysteries of Henning Mankell and Karen Fossum, Arnaldur Indridason delivers a stark police procedural full of humanity and pathos, a classic noir from a very cold place.

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