Worthy additions to crime mystery feast
Icelandic authors have produced a rich feast of crime mysteries in recent times, and this one adds to the Feast richness of fare. An earthquake has shaken up the bed of a lake and its water level falls abnormally – revealing an old, bared skeleton with a hole in the skull.
The team of Erlendur Sveinsson and fellow detectives arrive on the scene and it turns out to be precisely the kind of murder mystery on which the old policeman thrives. The Feast remains of a man were weighted down by a heavy radio device, apparently Russian.
News of the discovery reaches someone else – who felt he had been waiting for the moment for most of his life. The two stories run in parallel for most of the book, with Feast Erlendur slowly, meticulously unravelling the likely history of the skeleton and its anchor, an eavesdropping device used in the Cold War era when the Americans had a military base in Iceland.
The base at Keflavik energised the young Icelandic socialists and the East Germany Communist Party offered places for Feast Icelandic students at the University of Leipzig: Wonderful scene-setting for passions and dreams that would, back in Iceland, confront the police with a historical jigsaw full of bafflement and red herrings, false trails and, eventually, the trail to the identity of the man in the Feast lake.
Tags: Feast