This was an excellent piece of Scandicrime. Once I got reading the book, I could hardly put it down.

In Hofn, a small village on the south coast of Iceland, the new owners of a house find find some boxes left behind by the man who sold them the house. They return them, and the former owner notices an old muddied child's shoe among the items, with the name " Salvor" written on the sole. He is puzzled by this , not knowing anyone by the name Salvor. Shortly after the return of these items, the nursing home where his mother , an Alzheimer's patient, lives, calls to say his mother has had a heart attack, and asks him to tell his sister Salvor as well. His mother has been after asking her. But who is Salvor?

Meanwhile, a group of inexperienced hikers have gone missing in the midst of a harsh winter near the Hofn area. Johanna, a part of the search and rescue team, is out trying to locate the the hikers, who are feared dead.

In a remote, deserted radar station in Hofn, Hjorvar works mainly by himself, with one other worker taking the alternate shifts. One night, the phone that is connected to the entry/exit gate of the station rings. Horvar answers and a child's voice asks for her mother. Chillingly, it turns out that this phone has been disconnected for years.

Are these events connected? This novel had my blood running cold at times, and glad that I don't live alone.

Highly recommended. ( )

Oh good, I thought, a grim little Nordic noir interlude, snowbound and unpronounceable. This will help pass an afternoon. The introductory chapters caught my interest, with the forgotten mystery of a young girl's death in childhood and the disappearance of four amateur explorers in the middle of the Icelandic winter, later found frozen to death in the snow wearing only their underwear.

Then, like the search and rescue teams in the snow, I completely lost track. Is this a ghost story or a serial killer thriller, and are the two plots supposed to be related? The translation is also plodding and pointlessly detailed, to the point where I started skim-reading for key dialogue and discoveries. I did keep reading but the final revelations, laid out in flashback by the guilty parties, were a bit of a let down. Why was the screeching child driving complete strangers to their deaths? I think the brother was well within his rights to belt her over the head with his baseball bat. The parents should just have fessed up instead of throwing her into the sea. The bodies in the snow should have been the main story, and I liked the suggestion of a Wuthering Heights style ghost moaning at the cabin to be let in, but the ghost kid diluted both the potential and the dark energy of the deaths. And the search and rescue/police detective couple linking the two plots was just overkill, if you'll pardon the pun (her constant whining and clinginess made those chapters easy to skip).

Too many genres spoils the book, I'm afraid, but at least the cat survived. ( )

leider etwas fest paranormal und konstruiert ( )

Nok en begavet thriller, men jeg brød mig ikke særlig om den ( )