Brilliant Icelandic crime fiction. This is the third in the Hidden Iceland series, with the no-nonsense Detective Hulda Hermannsdottir doggedly working away at solving crimes while her family life veers ever closer to catastrophe.
Jonasson has executed the Hidden Iceland series in a rather disconcerting manner; reverse chronological order. In the first novel, The Darkness, his protagonist Hulda is 64 years old and taking a look at one last case before she retires. The second novel, The Island, is set 14 years earlier, when Hulda is 50. And this last one, The Mist, is ten years earlier again, when Hulda is 40 and trying to balance the demands of an unhappy 13 year old daughter with her professional life.
If you’ve read the first two novels in the series, you’re painfully aware of the tragedy about to occur in The Mist and yet powerless to stop it. Publishing the novels in reverse chronological order is an unusual choice, particularly as the crimes Hulda investigates in each novel are not linked to one another. It is difficult to justify, and makes me wonder why Jonasson bothered. If you’re new to the series, I recommend reading the Hidden Iceland series in chronological order (The Mist, The Island and then The Darkness) . There seems to be no great benefit in doing it the other way.
Of the three novels, The Mist has the most intriguing mystery at its heart, and also the most pervasive and unsettling sense of frigid isolation. Two elderly people prepare to endure another routine Christmas in a remote Icelandic farmhouse. As a blizzard kicks in, there is a knock at the door. A man enters. He says he has been hunting but has lost his way. (Spoiler alert; he hasn’t been hunting, and he hasn’t lost his way). Two months later Detective Hulda gets a call to say two bodies have been found at the farmhouse and they’ve been dead for some time. But whose bodies are they, and why? Read on.
At his best (and The Mist is Jonasson at his best), Jonasson is as good as my favourite Icelandic crime writer, Yrsa Sigurdardottir. If you like The Mist, do try Sigurdardottir’s books, particularly I Remember You and Why Did You Lie? Perfectly delectable crime writing for Icelandic-like winter days. 4 stars.
