Suspenseful saga

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/03/2024 (952 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Lára was only 15 when she disappeared off the face of the earth in 1956, becoming Iceland’s most heart-wrenching missing person for decades.

She’d gone to an island just off the coast near the capital of Reykjavík for the summer to be a maid for the wealthy couple who were the last inhabitants of the beautifully rugged chunk of rock. She up and gave her notice out of nowhere one morning, so they said, took her luggage, went down to the jetty, never to be seen again.

And Lára is still missing as this brilliant 2022 bestseller (translated by Victoria Cribb and published in English at the end of 2023) ranges over the decades before settling into 1986.

The murder mystery — based loosely on a true story — by prominent Icelandic mystery author Ragnar Jónasson and Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir (we’ll pause while you double back to make sure you read that right) was all the rage in Iceland. And it deserves it; the book is that good.

Maybe Lára just walked into the ocean. Maybe someone dumped her on the trip across to the mainland. Maybe she got to Reykjavík and who knows what happened next. She could still be alive.

The thing is, she never called her parents to say she was coming home, and no one’s ever found who ferried her across or was even booked to do so.

Back in 1956, a young cop assigned to look for the missing girl went to the island to question the upper-class couple who’d employed her. No, she hadn’t said why she was quitting. No, neither one watched her leave. How dare you have the effrontery to come to our home and ask us these impertinent questions — don’t you know who we are?

And with one phone call, the young cop gets ordered to get off their backs and leave them alone.

Every cop in the world would have seen the island as the logical place to start. Questioning her employers, the last ones to see her alive, police would at least have brought them to the cop shop, separated them, asked who else had been to the island.

The tale makes 10-year jumps, each time resurrecting the tragic unknowns but getting no answers. Each time the young cop is a decade older, no wiser, no freer to dig, but excoriated as the lead investigator who never found Lára.

So why 1986?

Possibly some characters who are in the “bear no resemblance to persons living or dead” (nudge-nudge wink-wink) category are safely dead now. Older Icelandic readers might understand.

The plot overlaps the real-life massive 1986 celebrations of Reykjavík’s 200th anniversary, and the finale coincides with the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in the city.

By 1986 we’ve met a young, suitably intrepid newspaper reporter who’s determined to solve Lára’s disappearance on the 30th anniversary of her vanishing and his equally intrepid sister who’s doing a graduate degree in Icelandic literature but is easily led astray from the dissertation trail by the thrill of amateur sleuthing.

It will hardly surprise regular readers of cold case mysteries that the siblings slowly uncover clues.

The authors have introduced a string of characters: a slimy developer, a boring city councillor with the planning department under his thumb, a powerful lawyer in whose presence others quake, a merchant who seems to get all the best contracts. Golly — could they have each other’s backs?

Icelandic mysteries have their own quirky circumstances not found elsewhere. There are the names, of course: trying to figure out why some people are known only by their surnames, even to friends; why others are identified by their first names, even to people who despise them; siblings from the same parents having different surnames.

Several characters say that everyone knows everyone else in Iceland, but in these books, people often don’t, despite a very finite number of persons in key positions and professions. Reykjavík has national and municipal governments, courts, cops, judges, lawyers, the country’s economic and medical systems, national media, a university, yet Reykjavík and its surrounding capital region make up less than a third of Winnipeg’s population.

It’s a different world that these authors know exceedingly well — enjoy.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin and his wife have Iceland on their bucket list but are just a tad skittish about hot lava.