Title: WINTERKILL
Author: Ragnar Jónasson
Publisher: Orenda Publishing
Read: March 2021
Expected publication: out now
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
Book Description:
Easter weekend is approaching, and
snow is gently falling in Siglufjörður, the northernmost town in Iceland, as
crowds of tourists arrive to visit the majestic ski slopes.
Ari Thór Arason is now a police inspector, but he’s separated from his
girlfriend, who lives in Sweden with their three-year-old son. A family reunion
is planned for the holiday, but a violent blizzard is threatening and there is
an unsettling chill in the air.
Three days before Easter, a nineteen-year-old local girl falls to her death from
the balcony of a house on the main street. A perplexing entry in her diary
suggests that this may not be an accident, and when an old man in a local
nursing home writes ‘She was murdered’ again and again on the wall of his room,
there is every suggestion that something more sinister lies at the heart of her
death…
As the extreme weather closes in, cutting the power and access to Siglufjörður,
Ari Thór must piece together the puzzle to reveal a horrible truth … one that
will leave no one unscathed.
Chilling, claustrophobic and disturbing, Winterkill marks the
startling conclusion to the million-copy bestselling Dark Iceland series and
cements Ragnar Jónasson as one of the most exciting authors in crime fiction.
What attracted me to this book:
I love Icelandic crime thrillers,
and the Dark Iceland series has been a great joy to read right from the start.
I was excited to get back to Siglufjörður and read about Ari Thór Arason’s
latest case, which involves the apparent suicide of a nineteen-year-old local
girl who jumped to her death from a balcony.
My musings:
Ari Thór’s estranged partner and son are visiting
over Easter, and again he struggles to find time for both family and his job, a
battle that is only to real for police or emergency workers, especially in a
place as remote as Siglufjörður. I
really felt for Ari Thór, who is only too keen to write the girl’s death off as
the suicide it appears to be and enjoy spending time with his son, and yet also
hears his inner warning bells chime that all is not as it seems.
After travelling to Iceland two
years ago, I can vividly picture the small remote town of Siglufjörður, now
made slightly more accessible by a new road and tunnel. Jonasson is a master at
creating atmosphere and tension through his setting, and this latest instalment
in the series is no exception. As the mystery slowly unravels and all its
layers are being stripped to reveal the tragic truth, I was thoroughly hooked.
All in all, WINTERKILL is a
slow-burning, character driven and highly atmospheric read from a master of
Iceland noir. It contains all the elements that make this genre so irresistible
for me, and I was hoping for many more books in the series, but found out that
this may be the last one. I will miss visiting Siglufjörður! Whilst WINTERKILL can
be read as a standalone, I would recommend starting the series from book one,
as Ari Thór’s backstory adds a lot of depth to the mystery. Highly recommend
the whole series!
Thank you to Edelweiss and Orenda
Books for the free electronic copy of this novel and for giving me the
opportunity to provide an honest review.
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