Multilayered murder mystery with Iceland's bleak landscape a key element

BOOK OF THE DAY: Hypothermia, By Arnaldur Indridason, Harvill Secker, 314pp, £11.99

THE FIRST thing to note is this is not a whodunit – the sort of crime thriller that taunts and tantalises leaving the reader guessing right up until the final chapter who the villain is, and in this age of the psychological thriller, why.

In Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indridason's new novel, Hypothermia, by the time they reach the half-way point, most readers will have guessed who the murderer is and have a good idea why the act was committed. What they won't know for sure is "how" and that unfolds as Indridason's recurring protagonist, the solid and dour Reykjavik police detective Erlendur, investigates a suspicious death.

What this book is, though, is an interesting examination of the interior life of a woman obsessed with the past, told by a writer who is as much a story teller as he is a hard-boiled crime writer.

A woman has been found dead, hanging from a beam in her summer cottage by Lake Thingvellir. It looks like a classic suicide. Maria, a fragile nervy type had been depressed since the death of her mother and forensics back up the initial impression of self-harm. But the open and shut case is prised apart when Maria’s friend Karen approaches Erlendur with her suspicion that it must have been murder and she gives him a tape of a seance that Maria had attended in the hope of a message from her dead mother.

Throughout the book, there are intimations of ghosts, particularly Maria’s mother and father and how this death when she was a child influenced the way Maria and her mother lived out their lives. Erlendur also has his own spectres from the past. Cold cases haunt him, particularly the missing teenagers who were never found from a case he worked on 30 years before and the mystery of his own brother lost in a snowstorm when they were children.

As in Indridason’s previous novels, Iceland’s unforgiving climate and its deserted, chilly and beautiful countryside are key elements in the story. The calm surface of a lake can conceal many secrets. He’s also shown in pervious work that he is strong on police procedure – The Draining Lake delved into the day-to-day drudgery of police investigation – but here Erlendur has a much more free hand as he conducts this investigation on his own time. The only complications in the detective’s life are his difficulties with his two adult children and their desire to see him make amends with their bitter and angry mother. Their bleak meeting in a roadside cafe is one of the most emotionally charged scenes in the book.

While the dead Maria’s interior life is fully exposed and examined – her voice on the seance tape is truly a voice from the dead – she remains curiously impossible to visualise or imagine as a fully fledged character.

Ultimately the book becomes all about Erlandur and his motivations, reactions and feelings. Past events have a way of influencing present actions and he is more inclined to brood on the past than he is, in his ordered, quite lonely life, to open himself up to new experiences.

The pace is slow, which will not be to every thriller reader’s taste – but Indridason’s ability to create a page-turner by telling a multilayered story is undeniable.

Bernice Harrison is an Irish Timesjournalist