Black Skies (2009)

If you’ve read Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbo or Henning Mankell and want to deepen your experience of the Nordic Noir sub-genre, then Arnaldur Indridason’s books need to be added to your TBR list ... a very poignant, thoughtful and satisfying conclusion. Not just for fans of Nordic Noir, this is a novel all crime fiction lovers will enjoy.

The greatest writer of international police procedurals is without any shadow of doubt the award-winning Arnaldur Indridason. Every time one of his Reykjavik Detective novels is translated into English, no matter how tall the review pile is, an Indriadson novel jumps to the top of the list. ... The skill that is so evident in all Indridason’s work, and especially in Black Skies is his ability to tell the tale with a brutal economy of words. The narrative is stripped down to its skeletal base, allowing the reader to become hypnotized when building the imagery that forms in the mind, and one that blends tragedy with humanity. This novel will force you to pause, and contemplate what you have read from time to time, comparing your own life against the protagonists’ misfortunes that peppers Black Skies. Sigurdur Oli, who has his own marital problems, soon sees beyond the ‘wife swopping’ and extortion, to something far stranger. He sees the dangers of wealth and the carousel that spun faster and faster, and with each turn the riders never knew when to stop, or when enough was enough in their desire for amassing wealth. The conclusion comes full circle and the tragedy of Anders, the drunken wino who became this way due to a fracture in his childhood made my eyes moisten, as did the tragedy of the bankers caught up in the machinations of greed. There is no finer writer working the literary police-procedural as, the melancholia that is - Black Skies is evidence of that statement.