"On a winter night, an eleven-year-old Salvör and her unmarried mother Sigurlína disembark at the remote, run-down fishing village of Óseyri, where life is "lived in fish and consists of fish." The two struggle to make their way amidst the rough, salt-worn men of the town. After Sigurlína's untimely death, Salvör pays for her funeral and walks home alone, precipitating her coming of age as a daring, strong-willed young woman who chops off her...

"Aldis hates her job working in a juvenile detention center in rural Iceland. The boys are difficult, the owners are unpleasant, and there are mysterious noises at night. And then two of the boys go astray. Decades later, single father Odinn is looking into alleged abuse at the center. The more he finds out, though, the more it seems the odd events of the 1970s are linked to the accident that killed his ex-wife. Was her death something more sinister?...

"A deeply compassionate story of old crimes and their consequences, The Shadow District is the first in a thrilling new series by internationally bestselling author Arnaldur Indridason. THE PAST In wartime Reykjavik, a young woman is found strangled in 'the shadow district', a rough and dangerous area of the city. An Icelandic detective and a member of the American military police are on the trail of a brutal killer. THE PRESENT A 90-year-old man...

"When a [homeless man] he met regularly on the night shift is found drowned in a ditch, no one seems to care. But his fate haunts Erlendur and drags him inexorably into the strange and dark underworld of the city"--Amazon.com.

Reykjavik, 1918. The eruptions of the Katla volcano darken the sky night and day. Yet despite the natural disaster, the shortage of coal and the Great War still raging in the outside world, life in the small capital goes on as always. Sixteen-year-old Mani Steinn lives for the movies. Awake, he lives on the fringes of society. Asleep, he dreams in pictures, the threads of his own life weaving through the tapestry of the films he loves. When the Spanish...

Hailed for combining the darkness of Nordic Noir with classic mystery writing, author Ragnar Jonasson's books are haunting, atmospheric, and complex. Rupture, the latest Ari Thór thriller, delivers another dark mystery that is chillingly stunning with its complexity and fluidity. Young policeman Ari Thór tries to solve a 50-year-old murder when new evidence surfaces. But the case proves difficult in a town where no one wants to know the truth,...

"After an eight-hundred-year slumber, the volcanoes in Iceland’s most populated region are showing signs of life. Earthquakes dominate the headlines. Echoes of the devastating eruptions in the past stir unease in the people. Volcanologist Anna Arnardóttir has spent her entire life studying the volcanic powers under the earth’s crust, but even she cannot fathom the catastrophe at hand. As a series of eruptions threaten most of Iceland’s population,...

The murder was meant as a punishment - but what sin could justify the method? The only person who might have answers is the victim's seven-year-old daughter, who was found hiding in the room where her mother died. And she's not talking. Newly promoted, out of his depth, Detective Huldar turns to Freyja and the Children's House for their expertise with traumatized young people. Freyja, who distrusts the police in general and Huldar in particular, isn't...