Death at the Sanatorium

April 1, 2024

With multiple works headed to TV, best-selling J�nasson offers a spinoff from his Hulda series. In 1983, Detective Hulda Hermannsdottir goes to a hospital in northern Iceland where a nurse has been murdered. In 2012, police officer Helgi Reykdal, who is writing his thesis on the 1983 case, revisits the ice-cold murder. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from July 15, 2024
Jónasson follows up Reykjavik with a meticulously plotted whodunit worthy of Agatha Christie, whose work he translates into Icelandic. In 2012 Reykjavik, 30-something Helgi Reykadi is finishing his criminology dissertation on an unsolved homicide in a tuberculosis sanatorium turned research facility. Flashbacks fill in details about Helgi’s subject: in 1983, someone tortured and murdered Ysra, a nurse at the facility, and a few days later the institution’s director suffered a suspicious fall from the balcony. Police arrested the building’s janitor on a false tip from nurse Tinna—who threw the janitor under the bus to distract from her own suspicious behavior—then let him go. After that, the case went cold. In 2012, Tinna turns up dead, so Helgi tracks down her and Ysra’s old coworkers in hopes of solving both murders. When his interview subjects turn out to be strangely tight-lipped, he launches into a twisty investigation that culminates in a volcanic finale. With scrupulously fair-play plotting, Helgi’s tumultuous relationship with his live-in girlfriend as an emotional anchor, and a worthy payoff, this is another winner from Jónasson. Readers will be rapt.

September 1, 2024
The retro title introduces a valentine to Golden Age whodunits relocated to Iceland. Helgi Reykdal, a graduate student in criminology at an English university, has returned to Iceland. Last summer he interned with Reykjav�k's criminal investigation department, and there's a job waiting for him there if he wants it. But he's torn by his conflicting desires to return to the U.K. and to appease Bergth�ra, the increasingly violent live-in girlfriend who wants him to stay. An additional inducement arrives with the possibility of writing his dissertation on the deaths a generation ago of a nurse and doctor at a sanitorium in the provincial northern town of Akureyri. When both Tinna Einarsd�ttir, the nurse who discovered both bodies, and Sverrir Eggertsson, the police investigator who allegedly solved the case back in 1983 by arresting what even he came to admit was the wrong suspect, summarily refuse to talk to him, his interest is naturally piqued. The circle of possible killers is tiny--Tinna herself, along with her colleague El�sabet, ambitious Dr. Thorri Thorsteinsson, and Broddi the caretaker--and in the course of Helgi's investigation, one of them obligingly narrows it even further by killing one of the others. Inspired by his reading of classic mysteries with similar settings, from Patrick Quentin'sA Puzzle for Fools to Ellery Queen'sThe Dutch Shoe Mystery, Helgi digs into the archives and questions the people who are willing to talk to him. The story, which toggles back and forth between 1983 and 2012, generates considerable suspense from a remarkably limited cast of characters living and dead. Clever, absorbing, and no more uplifting than you'd expect from this master of Icelandic noir.

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