Books
First Look: The Darkness by Ragnar Jónasson
The Darkness is the first book in a brand new crime series by Ragnar Jónasson, internationally bestselling author of the Dark Iceland series, the founder of Nordic Noir festival and the translator of 14 Agatha Christie novels. Ragnar was the very deserving winner of the Mörda Award in 2016’s Dead Good Reader Awards and we’ve been huge fans ever since.
Spanning Reykjavik, the Icelandic highlands and cold, isolated fjords, The Darkness – coming in March 2018 – is the start of a series like no other. To be followed by The Island and The Mist, the Hidden Iceland books trace Detective Inspector Hulda’s life in reverse order, slowly revealing more and more about how she came to be the woman she is – a rather prickly, rather lonely woman with a very sad, very dark past and an unshakable, unusual sense of justice.
Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir of the Reykjavik Police is 64 when we meet her in The Darkness. On the verge of retirement, Hulda isn’t looking forward to whatever lies on the other side. Her job is her life. But at least she has time to prepare for the unknown.
What she doesn’t expect is for her boss to unceremoniously tell her to clear her desk one day. A young man is coming in to take her place. A rising star. After giving her life to the job, she is no longer needed.
Hulda is dismissively told that she can pick a cold case to work on for two more weeks, and she knows just the one. A young woman who was found dead on the seaweed-covered rocks of the Vatnsleysuströnd, a woman who no one really cared that much about because she was Russian, waiting to be granted asylum. An outsider. Unneeded. Her death was ruled a suicide after a slapdash investigation.
But when Hulda starts to ask questions she soon realises that there was something more to this case – something darker and more bloody. This was not the only young Russian woman to disappear from the hostel where they waited for asylum. And when her own force tries to put the brakes on an investigation that she is determined to finish, Hulda has just days to discover the truth. No matter how many lines she has to cross to get it.
Have you read The Darkness by Ragnar Jonasson yet? Let us know in the comments below!
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I love, love reading the Huldar series, that I await each new book on the series with excitement. Each book is just as good as the first time I read the start of the series. Keep Huldar series coming.