Nordic Noir and Mysteries!
The chestnut man
Sveistrup, Søren, 1968- author
2019
A psychopath is terrorizing Copenhagen. His calling card is a "chestnut man"--a handmade doll-which he leaves at each bloody crime scene. Examining the dolls, forensics makes a shocking discovery, a fingerprint belonging to a government minister's daughter who had been kidnapped and murdered a year ago. To save innocent lives, a pair of detectives must piece together the Chestnut Man's gruesome clues.
Death at the sanatorium
Ragnar Jónasson, 1976-, author
2024
1983 At a former sanatorium in the north of Iceland, now a hospital ward, an old nurse, Yrsa, is found murdered. Detective Hulda Hermannsdottir and her boss, Sverrir, are sent to investigate her death. There, they discover five suspects: the chief physician, two junior nurses, a young doctor, and the caretaker, who is arrested, but subsequently released. Less than a week after the murder, the chief physician, is also found dead, having apparently fallen from a balcony. Sverrir, rules his death as suicide and assumes that he was guilty of the murder as well. 2012 Almost thirty years later, Helgi Reykdal has been studying criminology in the UK, but decides to return to Iceland when he is offered the job which detective Hulda Hermannsdottir is about to retire from. He is writing his thesis on the 1983 murders in the north. As Helgi delves deeper into the past, and starts his new job, he decides to try to meet with the original suspects. But soon he finds silence and suspicion at every turn, as he tries to finally solve the mystery from years before.
The kingdom
Nesbø, Jo, 1960- author
2020
A mechanic from a rural mountain village finds the limits of his family loyalties tested when his entrepreneur brother announces plans to revitalize the community through a hotel project that becomes increasingly overshadowed by greed and dangerous secrets.
A nearly normal family
Edvardsson, M. T., author
2019
Seventeen-year-old Stella stands accused of the brutal murder of a man almost fifteen years her senior. She is an ordinary teenager from an upstanding local family. Stella's father, a pastor, and mother, a criminal defense attorney, find their moral compasses tested as they defend their daughter, while struggling to understand why she is a suspect.
Snowblind
Ragnar Jónasson, 1976-, author
2015
Siglufjörður: an idyllically quiet fishing village in Northern Iceland, where no one locks their doors--accessible only via a small mountain tunnel. Ari Thór Arason: a rookie policeman on his first posting, far from his girlfriend in Reykjavik--with a past that he's unable to leave behind. When a young woman is found lying half-naked in the snow, bleeding and unconscious, and a highly esteemed, elderly writer falls to his death in the local theater, Ari is dragged straight into the heart of a community where he can trust no one, and secrets and lies are a way of life. Past plays tag with the present and the claustrophobic tension mounts, while Ari is thrust ever deeper into his own darkness--blinded by snow, and with a killer on the loose.
The tenant
Engberg, Katrine, 1975- author
2020
When a young woman is discovered brutally murdered in her own apartment, with an intricate pattern of lines carved into her face, Copenhagen police detectives Jeppe Korner and Anette Werner are assigned to the case. In short order, they establish a link between the victim, Julie Stender, and her landlady, Esther de Laurenti, who's a bit too fond of drink and the host of raucous dinner parties with her artist friends. Esther also turns out to be a budding novelist-and when Julie turns up as a murder victim in the still-unfinished mystery she's writing, the link between fiction and real life grows both more urgent and more dangerous. But Esther's role in this twisted scenario is not quite as clear as it first seems.
