Reykjavik Nights by Arnaldur Indridason, translated by Victoria Cribb, Minotaur, 294 pages, $25.99
Since childhood, when he and his brother were lost in a blizzard in the mountains where he grew up, and he was found but his brother was not, Arnaldur Indridason’s Inspector Erlendur has been obsessed with disappearances. Throughout this superb series by the Icelandic author, we’ve seen how deeply that tragedy has affected the glum detective. In “Reykjavik Nights,” we learn how his special interest propelled him into the top ranks of investigators.
This prequel is set in the days when he was a young traffic cop, dealing with car accidents, street fights and such. When a homeless man he knows named Hannibal is found drowned in a pond near a waste-ground, and then a young woman goes missing, and both cases are allowed to go cold, Erlendur doggedly investigates them — even with no authority to do so. Hannibal’s story, it turns out, is worth knowing.
Like his protagonist, Indridason is calm, methodical and unassuming. With Reykjavik’s nights — “so strangely sunny and bright, yet in another sense so dark and desperate” — as a backdrop, what starts out as a modest tale of an unfortunate death develops into a deeply involving tale of chronic neglect, drug addiction, spousal abuse and the unsavory nature of fate. For Erlendur, it may be something of a curse that he can never free himself of his obsession — even his leisure reading is consumed by books about horrible disappearances. But it’s also something of a blessing in giving him a clear-cut role in life.
Falling in Love by Donna Leon, Atlantic Monthly, 264 pages, $26
Donna Leon does some flashing back of her own in “Falling in Love,” re-introducing Commissario Guido Brunetti to Flavia Petrelli, the opera star featured in the “Death at La Fenice” (1992), the first installment in her widely admired series. Back then, Brunetti investigated charges that she had poisoned a celebrated German conductor. This time, he looks into her fears that she is being stalked by someone who has been leaving heaps of yellow roses for her, even in places that are supposed to be private.
The plot gives Leon an opportunity to take us into the world of Venice opera. Backstage at Teatro La Fenice, where Flavia is singing “Tosca,” she overhears a young contralto with such remarkable ability that she can’t resist interrupting her practice to meet her. When the girl is pushed down a flight of outdoor stairs and seriously injured, Brunetti has reason to take Flavia’s fears seriously.
There are no more leisurely mysteries being written than Leon’s. For newcomers to her books, it may seem like this one takes forever to get going, what with all the dinner talk and walks through the city and tours of the opera hall. But that’s part of the charm of the series. Brunetti is unfailingly good company, and when he isn’t, in scenes where he impatiently yells at Flavia for being melodramatic, he is wonderfully refreshing. In the end, the identity of the stalker matters less than the things the threat brings out in the other characters.
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Blood on Snow by Jo Nesbo, translated by Neil Smith, Knopf, 213 pages, $23.95
Jo Nesbo, on leave from his best-selling Harry Hole thrillers, takes us back to 1977 with this offbeat novella about an Oslo hit man, Olav, who finds himself in the tricky position of having to “fix” his main client’s wife. The client, Hoffmann, is a big-time heroin dealer. Hoffmann’s wife, Corina, is a striking beauty who, with her husband’s knowledge, receives daily afternoon visits from a man who beats her up and forces himself on her sexually. Watching all this through her apartment window, Olav falls for her at first sight.
Olav is one quirky hit man. Among the deficiencies he dwells on are his inability to deal with prostitutes because he “fall(s) in love so quickly.” He’s dyslexic and has difficulty counting to 10. And he feels such sympathy for the people who survive his victims, he’s happy to have his guilt assuaged when he discovers one of them reading a Communist newspaper. “I just think they’re wrong,” he says.
Trying to wriggle out of an impossible situation, Olav cozies up to the Fisherman, another major drug-dealer, with violent results. But “Blood on Snow,” based on James M. Cain’s “Love’s Lovely Counterfeit” with a strong hint of the French New Wave classic, “Breathless,” has a weirdly light touch even when Olav is doing in his father with a toilet brush. “You cut someone’s throat with a knife,” admonishes his father. To which Olav responds, “That would have been too quick.” Says the old man with a smile, “Now, that’s my boy.”
Lloyd Sachs, a regular contributor to Printers Row, is the author of a forthcoming book about producer and singer-songwriter T Bone Burnett.