Jar City

Arnaldur Indridason doesn't sugarcoat his protagonists with sweet personalities. They aren't perfect people with mundane lives. Inspector Erlender is a divorced father with a drug addicted daughter living on the fringe of society. She occasionally scrounges Erlender's flat for money or a meal. And like any parent who loves his child to the brink of insanity, Erlender takes whatever attention he can get from her. In the meantime, he has a murder to solve. An elderly man has been bashed in the head with an ashtray. It wasn't a robbery so who would want to kill a frail and quiet man in his 70s? As Erlender digs into the victim's past he uncovers horrible truths about the dead man. An unsolved cold case suddenly heats up and Erlender show more discovers just how complicated blood ties can be. show less

What I hoped would be an entertaining police procedural set in Iceland managed to exceed all of my expectations. The small nation feel of the investigation made the madness of the plot somehow more convincing, the questions of genetics, violence, and family origin more poignant, and the eventual discovery of the perpetrator, and his motivation, truly heart wrenching. I devoured this book in two days.

An outstanding first novel that has much more to recommend it then just its Icelandic setting. I look forward to meeting up with inspector Erlendur again soon.

It's hard for me to believe this is a debut novel. The author is, of course, a journalist and so the possessor of writerly skills; still, a novel is something wholly and entirely other than he could be expected to do in his sleep.

I think the first-novel-ishness comes out in a few small ways. He introduces a deeply disturbing sub-plot and does almost nothing with it. He has characters behave in some ways that don't scan with their stated behaviors. But on the whole, the book's as accomplished a noir as I've seen in many a long month.

I came away from this book chilled, angry, and annoyed at the unfairess of life. Perfect noir! I see that the author carefully crafted his story to elicit these feeling in me, and I salute his success. I am show more aware that the story was, for 2000, quite ground-breaking in its use of genetics as a plot-point, but it doesn't feel as amazing today, when "Scientific Adam" and "Scientific Eve" have been genetically identified. Still, I was impressed by the good handling of the subject matter...I wish it had been given a little more prominence in the story, but that's a minor cavil.

If you haven't yet read the book, I'd say you should, because its dark, gloomy pleasures are significally rewarding. I warn the squeamish: Violence exists here, and a lot of uccchy stuff that's not violent but is revolting takes place. show less

In Jar City we are introduced to Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson. Yep, another Scandinavian murder mystery, although this time set in Reykjavik, Iceland, which is an unusual setting, to say the least. (Why do the Scandinavians write so much crime? And do it so well?) Apparently most murders in Iceland are boring to solve: they're drunken crimes of passion, badly covered up (if at all). But this one, starting with an old man murdered in his basement flat with a cryptic clue scrawled on some paper, is different. Erlendur keeps on doggedly at it, refusing to accept an easy explanation, untangling the threads slowly and meticulously, until the whole story, spanning decades, comes to light.

At first I thought this book was nothing out of the show more ordinary (apart from the Icelandic setting), but I found myself quite unable to put it down. I couldn't see where the plot was going to go, and I had a great time sniffing out the clues with Erlendur. He's your standard great-cop-dreadful-ex-husband-and-father character, but he never felt like a cliche and I never got bored with him.

Interestingly, some clues (the cryptic note, most especially) are withheld from us, the readers. We know there was a cryptic clue, but we're not let in on its content for quite some time. It's an unusual tactic (usually the reader is given everything, unless the narrator is very sneaky), but I never found it frustrating. Everything came to light as we needed it.

I do have my usual quibbles about some awkward translating (or maybe European crime really does read awkwardly in the original language), but it was nothing I couldn't live with. show less

Iceland is a small rainy island, where nothong happens and even the murders are dull. Except this one.... At first glance it's just an old dirty man beaten to death for his money but inspector Erlendur soon discovers that it's nore than meets the eye. The clues lead him to the past where bloodlines hide a terrible secret....

This is Arnaldur Indridason's first installment in his excellent crime series. Erlendur is an aging detective in the Reykjavik CID. He's a solitary man with a bad divorce behind him and a drug-addicted daughter with whom he has a difficult relationship, although they are both trying very hard. In this series debut, Erlendur investigates the case of an old man who is found bludgeoned to death in his basement apartment. It seems to be a case of random violence, until Erlendur delves into the man's history and discovers a violent and unsavory past.

The series portrays daily life in Iceland, a unique place where a relatively small population is isolated from the world by their location and culture. Indridason's descriptions are vivid and show more his characters are interesting. The case was as bleak as the Atlantic storms battering Reykjavik throughout the book, which has the characteristic feel of a Scandinavian crime novel, albeit in a unique setting. show less

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I read this at the same time as The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. They actually have some elements in common - both are about untangling decades-old family secrets, involving sex, violence and intellectual endeavour. In Jar City, the intellectual endeavour is science, both forensic medicine and the Icelandic national genetic research database; and the mode of the novel is a detective story. The winning factor is the portrayal of this small island society, where almost everyone knows almost everyone, but people still slip between the cracks and the genetic mapping project starts to uncover hidden history. Our detective hero is much more at home with ordinary criminals, and dealing show more with the fallout of his broken family, than with the scientists who seem an alien culture grafted onto Iceland's gritty foundations. It also features a character who is not gendered, which takes some linguistic manoeuvring in a society where most people take a gendered patronymic. In fact the plot once entangled is fairly straightforward, and the resolution (dare I say it) a little glib, but it was a jolly good read, and the image of a room full of jars containing various things that forensic scientists might be interested in (the "jar city" of the title) will linger with me longer than I wanted it to. show less