Living out in the middle of nowhere can drive a person crazy
“The Mist” by Ragnar Jonasson (Minotaur, 320 pages, $27.99)
The Icelandic author Ragnar Jonasson is steadily establishing himself as one of the elite Scandinavian crime novelists. The final book in his Hidden Iceland trilogy just came out and it might be the finest of the lot.
The first book in the series, “The Darkness” (2018), introduced readers to Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdottir of the Reykjavik Police.
In that book, she’s about to retire from the force and despite the fact that she’s been a hard-working, distinguished investigator, her boss is treating her rather disrespectfully.
He suggests that she should just take a vacation until her official retirement date arrives. He’s all ready to install her replacement at her desk. Hulda is insulted and she refuses to leave. Instead she delves into a cold case that has largely been ignored.
While it isn’t essential to read these books in order, it is certainly more pleasurable because they are written in reverse chronological order. In “The Darkness,” Hulda is a widow. She doesn’t miss her late husband, but she really misses her daughter who died years ago when she was still a teenager.
So we’ll already know as we read the next two books that Hulda has had a troubled marriage and that her daughter’s death was a tragedy. In the second book, “The Island” (2019), Hulda is called out to investigate a suspicious death on a remote island off the coast of Iceland. A group of old friends had gathered for a reunion when one of them fell off of a cliff. Was it a suicide? Or, was this a murder?
The final book in the series, “The Mist,” takes us back to the time when Hulda’s family was still intact. Her husband and daughter are still alive. In “The Mist,” we observe Hulda’s husband behaving suspiciously while their daughter is refusing to come out of her room.
If you have already read the first two books then you’ll know how they died and what is happening. You will comprehend the full extent of Hulda’s sorrows in the first book. Hulda had been oblivious to what was transpiring in her household.
In “The Mist” Hulda is investigating the case of a missing person. One summer, a young woman has been traveling around remote locales when she mysteriously vanishes without a trace. Most of this story takes place in a desolate part of Iceland.
There were once numerous farms in this region but almost all of them have been abandoned — it was simply too difficult to eke out an existence there. Most of the story takes place at the farmstead of a stubborn couple who have chosen to remain in what is now utter isolation. Shades of Alfred Hitchcock.
A visitor arrives at the couple’s door right as a blizzard is about to hit the area. The author’s deceptive plotting in this story is certain to blow readers away. It’s not really about Hulda. At the end she arrives on the scene and reacts just like this reviewer did by thinking, gosh, how astonishing.
Vick Mickunas of Yellow Springs interviews authors every Saturday at 7 a.m. and on Sundays at 10:30 a.m. on WYSO-FM (91.3). For more information, visit www. wyso.org/programs/booknook. Contact him at vick@ vickmickunas.com.