Bleak landscape, bleak characters, bleak story. Icelandic murders are simple ones usually insists Inspector Erlendur. This one is certainly not. An elderly man, Holberg, is found dead in his apartment with a strange note left on the body. The case then leads in a variety of directions: to a young child, the product of a rape, who had apparently died of a brain tumor; the suicide of her mother; the disappearance at sea of Holberg’s friend; additional rapes; a terminally ill cop unsympathetic cop who ignored the rape; and the search for a bride who ran away after her wedding, because, we learn, she had been abused by her father who then groped her in her wedding dress. Not to mention Erlendur’s daughter, a drug addict trying to break the habit and who is pregnant. And Erlendur is afraid to go to the doctor for his chest pains.Not to mention it rains all the time. But a well-written, good story.
