Innocent Icelanders dropping like flies

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This article was published 10/06/2023 (1199 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Troubled police detective Emma needs all her detective skills when a young man without an enemy in Iceland dies in a fire in his parents’ house with all the doors and windows locked — and a second murder follows.

Everyone, it goes without saying, has secrets and knows more than they’re saying, while all the coppers have their own demons to battle.

Eva Björg Ægisdottir’s Night Shadows (translated by Vicky Cribb, Orenda Books, 341 pages, $23) released in English in November 2022, is a complex but terrific murder mystery in which the innocent suffer horribly. Not a barrel of laughs, but hey, way good.

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Ghastly eww-gross animal mutilations inevitably lead to even ghastlier human murders as evil disciples of Odin lay claim to an ancient, heretofore unknown, centuries-earlier-than-ever-imagined Icelandic settlement in the bustling community of New Selfoss on Highway 59 north of Brokenhead — don’t trust faulty official maps, just Google it.

Plunking himself right in the middle of it through his amateur sleuth skills and sheer nosiness is meddling autistic super-analytic veterinarian Dr. Peter Bannerman, much to the worry of his wife Laura and her grievously annoyed RCMP brother Kevin.

The second in a series, Winnipeg author Philipp Schott’s Six Ostriches (ECW Press, 272 pages, $25) is an amiable enough murder mystery with an improbable but likable hero, though the plot gets muddled and the relationships and motives involving way too many characters get a tad confusing.

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An old reclusive rich guy is found butchered in a decaying mansion — so what does this have to do with a long-dead serial killer of little children who claimed he could see the future?

Indeed, what does it have to do with a threatened youngish mother in an unnamed British city who selfishly failed to protect her long-missing addict brother many years ago, or with the scum who attacked her brother, or with the serial killer currently stalking the streets, or with a dead baby?

The likable cops in Alex North’s The Angel Maker (Celadon Books, 336 pages, $25) are as befuddled as readers — it’s a complex mystery, but utterly filled with depravity and despair. A tough read.

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Secret Yukon town Rockton is now history, so married coppers Alex Dalton and Casey (of varying fake surnames) set up the new secret Yukon town of Haven’s Rock — what do you suppose happens next in a book titled Murder at Haven’s Rock (Kelley Armstrong, Minotaur Books, 352 pages, $24)?

The vast Yukon may hide secret towns, but the enormous forest seems overrun by mysterious figures, some or all of whom may be involved in the deaths and disappearances of several people.

Fans of Armstrong’s Rockton series may consider this a decent placeholder until Haven’s Rock gets up and properly running and generating murders galore, but newcomers will be totally lost and will just wander around in the bush until a hungry bear finds them.

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When a kayaker and an angler drown with big bite marks all over them in the perilous channels of Lake Michigan off rural Wisconsin, the new police chief Jon (Flatfoot) Flanders turns to… pause for suspense… cryptozoologist Morgan Carter.

Could A Death in Door County (Berkley, 326 pages, $37) — or, more accurately, could deaths in Door County — be the work of a distant relative of the Loch Ness Monster, or could they be (shudder) murders by monsters that walk on two legs?

It’s a nifty little mystery from Annelise Ryan that features two really appealing characters and a super-great dog. Look, don’t sweat it — do you reckon it would get a good review if the dog gets monsterized?

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Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin reckons kayakers should be like dog walkers — they find the murdered bodies, but they’re never the murdered bodies themselves.