Cold case in Iceland

You don't have to know how to pronounce Arnaldur Indridason's name or the names of his characters to appreciate his novels, if that is your reason for avoiding them. The story is the thing, and his stories are superb, giving readers a peak into Icelandic culture along the way.

Into Oblivion (2014) ranks high among Indridason's mysteries, or as his publisher persists in calling them, thrillers. Most of them are about police officers attempting to solve murders, so I call them mysteries.

This story has two mysteries and two detectives. One thing Indridason tells us about Icelandic culture is that everyone is commonly known by his or her first name, so the police officers are Erlendur Sveinsson and Marion Briem, or 99 percent of the time just Erlendur and Marion. A man's body is found in a remote region, but an autopsy reveals the man must have fallen from a great height. Tall buildings are scarce in Iceland in 1979, when the story takes place, but there is a very large hangar at the U.S. Air Force base, and when the dead man is identified it turns out he worked as a mechanic on the huge Air Force planes serviced in that hangar. This leads to a turf battle between the local police and the Air Force.

Yet while this is going on, Erlendur is distracted by a cold case from the 1950s in which a teenage girl left for school one morning and never got there. Officially the police have abandoned the case as unsolvable, but Erlendur has a passion for missing person cases. As a boy he and his brother had been lost in a fierce winter storm. Erlendur was found, but his brother was never seen again. Now he wants to discover what happened to the girl before all witnesses are dead.

It turns out that the missing girl case is a better mystery, and more thrilling, than the other. Put together they make another excellent Indridason book. Or should I be calling him Arnaldur?