Ice & Crime

Hoping to put behind him tragedy in his professional life and to resolve the turmoil in his personal life, Reykjavík police officer Guðgeir Fransson has moved as far away from home as he can, marking time in a dead-end job in a small town in eastern Iceland. His detective's instincts are triggered when he hears about a foreign woman who arrived in this tight-knit community—and then disappeared as suddenly as she had appeared. The trail of the missing woman takes him back to Reykjavík, and then to a remote farmhouse beneath dark mountains where an elderly woman and her son live with their sinister past.

The darker the secret, the harder to bury it. Compelling reading - Lilja Sigurðardóttir As a police team is called in to investigate a woman's suicide at the Hólmsheiði prison outside Reykjavík, to detective Guðgeir Fransson it looks like a tragic but straightforward case. It's only afterwards that the pieces begin to fall into place and he takes a deeper interest in Kristín Kjarr's troubled background, and why she had found herself in prison. His search leads him to a series of brutal crimes committed twenty years before and the unexplained disappearance of the prime suspect, whose wealthy family closed ranks as every effort was made to keep skeletons securely hidden in closets – while the Reykjavík police struggle to deal with a spate of fresh attacks that bear all the hallmarks of a copycat.

When wealthy doctor Ríkharður Magnússon goes to sleep in his luxurious caravan and doesn't wake up, detectives Guðgeir Fransson and Elsa Guðrún are called to the Westman Islands to investigate what looks like murder. Suspicion immediately falls on Ríkharður's young, beautiful and deeply troubled girlfriend – but there are no easy answers in this case as they are drawn into family feuds, disgruntled friends and colleagues, and the presence of a group of fitness-obsessed over-achievers with secrets of their own. As their investigation makes progress, Guðgeir and Elsa Guðrún are forced to confront their own preconceptions and prejudices as they uncover the sinister side of Ríkharður's past. Harm is the third novel featuring the soft-spoken Reykjavík detective Guðgeir Fransson to appear in English. Sólveig Pálsdóttir again weaves a complex web of intrigue that plays out in the Westman Islands, remote southern Iceland and Reykjavík while asking some searching questions about things society accepts at face value – and others it is not prepared to tolerate.

A retired, reclusive woman is found on a bitter winter morning, clubbed to death in Reykjavik's old graveyard. Detectives Guðgeir and Elsa Guðrún face one of their toughest cases yet, as they try to piece together the details of Arnhildur's austere life in her Red House in the oldest part of the city. Why was this solitary, private woman attending séances, and why was she determined to keep her severe financial difficulties so secret? Could the truth be buried deep in her past and a long history of family enmity, or could there be something more? A stranger keeps a watchful eye on the graveyard and Arnhildur's house. With the detectives running out of leads, could the Medium, blessed and cursed with uncanny abilities, shed any light on Arnhildur's lonely death?