
INSPECTOR Ari Thór Arason’s picture-perfect Easter is about to implode.
With his former partner and their son due to fly in for a short visit, Ari Thór has been anticipating a few days of happy family downtime. Since the dissolution of the couple’s on-off relationship, Kristín and little Stefnir have been living in Sweden. Ari Thór has waited for months for this reunion with Stefnir and is determined to make the most of their too-few days together.
Woken well before dawn, however, he’s now in the early stages of opening an enquiry into the death of a teenage student whose body has been found lying in an iced-over street.
Siglufjörður is not normally a hotbed of crime – in fact, it’s anything but. In Ari Thór’s six years in this remote fishing town on the north coast of Iceland he’s had to deal with only a handful of serious incidents.
This is his first real challenge as head of the local police team of two. With his former boss now comfortably settled in Reykjavík, the newly promoted Ari Thór has only an impertinent junior officer, Ögmundur, for backup.
Leaving a potential murder investigation in Ögmundur’s inexperienced hands isn’t ideal, but if he’s to have the bonding time he desperately wants with his son, Ari Thór will need to insist that this young upstart shoulders his share of responsibility while his boss is off-duty.
But, with a blizzard looming and a past lover resurfacing, the planned break is fast becoming far more complicated than any simple long-weekend at home should be.
Winterkill is the sixth and final book in Ragnar Jónasson’s Dark Iceland series of crime thrillers, translated into English by David Warriner. It features characters and storylines established in Snowblind, Nightblind, Blackout, Rupture and Whiteout but can easily be read in isolation.