Strange Shores

One dark Icelandic night a young woman walks out into the frozen fjords and disappears, decades later Detective Erlendur comes to the remote community. He is searching for the missing woman and his own long lost brother. In the process he will unearth old secrets, buried passions and ultimately face the truth that has shaped his entire life.

In this novel Indridason bids farewell to his long serving character with an investigation that is heavy with atmospheric angst. This isn’t a book for lovers of car chases, wisecracking heroes and cheap thrills; it appeals to readers who ask for something more challenging from their crime fiction, and delivers with aplomb.

There is a crime certainly and a decidedly brutal one too, but the focus is very much on why rather than how and by whom the deed was done. Erlendur is a man both chasing after ghosts and being pursued by ghosts of his own.

The bleak settings and introspective central characters of Scandinavian crime fiction have become so ubiquitous in recent years to be almost a cliché. Here though they suit the subject matter perfectly, the transgressions in Strange Shores are as much against the morals people live by as the statutes set out in a law book.

This is a dark, atmospheric and brilliantly imagined book; it provides its readers with a resolution to the problems it sets that if troubling is satisfyingly final.