Jar City, A Rekjavik Thriller / Arnaldur Indriðason

My detective novel tour of Scandinavia continues to Iceland where we meet Inspector Erlendur, a gritty individual who is married to his job, doesn’t take good care of himself, frequently falls asleep and wakes in the morning in an easy chair in his living room, worries about his daughter... Sound familiar? He's really not so unlike Kurt Wallander for those who may be pining for the Swedish gumshoe after the series concluded with The Troubled Man.

In Jar City an old man has his head bashed in with a large ash tray, and a mysterious note left near the body and a cryptic photo of a grave site offer clues to the mystery surrounding his death. The circumstances of his murder are rooted in events that happened forty years ago and it is ingenious how Erlendur teases out the details of the connections between people and events that gradually reveal the identity of the murderer. The key to linking perpetrator to victim is a marker of an unusual genetic disease recorded in Iceland’s genetic database, Íslendingabók, a real life and very controversial effort to map every Icelandic inhabitant’s genetic code. Click here for a piece about Iceland’s controversial genetics database project

The translation from the original Icelandic by Bernard Scudder is absolutely wonderful, especially given my criticism of The Snowman. There is nothing awkward or strange with the translation of Jar City and the prose flows flawlessly (though the translation was obviously geared to a British readership).

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So Much for That / Lionel Shriver

This novel comes from the 2005 Orange Prize winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin , a disturbing book in which a parent with ambivalent feelings towards motherhood deals with the aftermath of a Columbine-style school killing perpetrated by her son. Lionel Shriver has said that she prefers to create characters that are hard to love, and So Much for That certainly contains some flinty characters, who although they may be hard to love, are nevertheless very believable. The topic this time is healthcare in America. Shep is all ready to launch into an exotic early retirement on the island of Pemba off the eastern coast of Africa, but when his wife reveals a diagnosis of mesothelioma, he must hold on to his job to maintain family health coverage to see her through her devastating illness. His work colleague and friend, Jackson, experiences a medical dilemma completely of his own doing, which proves to be his un doing. Jackson's daughter suffers from an unusual genetic disorde...

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