Snowblind: A Thriller (The Dark Iceland Series) Paperback – November 7, 2017 by Ragnar Jonasson (A Thomas Dunne Book for St. Martin's Griffin)

The five novels of Ragnar Jonasson’s Dark Iceland series, which debuted in Iceland in 2010, have received much deserved critical acclaim since the first English translations began to appear: Snowblind and Nightblind in 2015, Blackout, Rupture and Whiteout in 2016-17.

In the gripping Snowblind, he creates the setting that defines the essence of his vision of “Dark Iceland” – the tiny, isolated fishing village of Siglufjördur, “at the edge of the northern ocean,” as stunningly beautiful as it is claustrophobic, surrounded by a ring of mountains and inaccessible for much of the year except via a small tunnel. The protagonist, a young outsider and rookie policeman, Ari Thor, proves himself capable of patient investigation and sharp insights, but is hampered throughout by his sense of not belonging to this alien environment: “He felt like a stranger… a traveller who had forgotten to buy a return ticket.”

A translator of Agatha Christie, Jonasson is skilled in the construction of an absorbing mystery story. Snowblind, like the later novels in the Dark Iceland series, is an exceptionally well-crafted piece of classic detective fiction, with the enclosed space of Siglufjördur providing a circumscribed cast of characters, harbouring secrets and concealing hidden connections that must be uncovered if the mystery is to be solved. What most distinguishes Jonasson’s series, however, is an environment that throughout the novel applies its own frightening and unpredictable pressures.

Iceland has provided some of the most haunting and life-threatening landscapes of contemporary crime fiction. Even the Reykjavík-set novels of Arnaldur Indridason’s are shadowed by memories of lives lost in the mountains and frozen fjords. In Jonasson’s Snowblind, the destructive depths of the Icelandic winter – freezing darkness, blizzards, avalanches – all reinforce the sense of dangerous entrapment. When a murder is committed the scene of the crime has a perverse beauty: the “blood-red snow that formed a halo” around the body of the victim. The mysteriousness of the scene adds to our sense of the inhuman otherness of a savage natural world that thwarts Ari Thor’s investigation at every turn: “This peaceful little town was being compressed by the snow, no longer a familiar winter embrace but a threat like never before.”  Read more, including our reviews of Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s Why Did You Lie? and Antti Tuomainen’s Dark As My Heart.