Arnaldur Indriðason

The loner Erlendur has recently joined the police force as a young officer and immediately sinks into the darkness of Reykjavík's underworld. The beat on the streets in Reykjavik is busy: traffic accidents, theft, domestic violence, contraband, and an unexplained death. When a homeless man he met regularly on the night shift is found drowned in a ditch, no one seems to care. But his fate haunts Erlendur and drags him inexorably into the strange and...

Decades after a woman disappears from the Icelandic fjords amid a tempest of lies, betrayal, and revenge, Detective Erlendur searches the same region for his long-lost brother, only to uncover disturbing secrets.

When her brother goes missing after contacting her from the site of an Icelandic rescue mission, Kristin is pursued by vigilantes from the U.S. Army and discovers a conspiracy involving a crashed World War II plane and the fate of its survivors.

Unofficially investigating a suspicious suicide, Inspector Erlendur becomes increasingly unsettled by the unsolved cases of two young people who went missing decades earlier under circumstances tied to his own past.

"A deeply compassionate story of old crimes and their consequences, The Shadow District is the first in a thrilling new series by internationally bestselling author Arnaldur Indridason. THE PAST In wartime Reykjavik, a young woman is found strangled in 'the shadow district', a rough and dangerous area of the city. An Icelandic detective and a member of the American military police are on the trail of a brutal killer. THE PRESENT A 90-year-old man...

"An elderly couple are worried about their granddaughter. They know she's been smuggling drugs, and now she's gone missing. Looking for help, they turn to Konrad, a former policeman whose reputation precedes him. Always absent-minded, he constantly ruminates on the fate of his father, who was stabbed to death decades ago. But digging into the past reveals much more than anyone set out to discover, and a little girl who drowned in the Reykjavik city...

A frozen body is discovered in the icy depths of Langjökull glacier, apparently that of a businessman who disappeared thirty years before. At the time, an extensive search and police investigation yielded no results-one of the missing man's business associates was briefly held in custody, but there wasn't enough evidence to charge him. Now the associate is arrested again and Konrad, the retired policeman who originally investigated the disappearance,...

A 90-year-old man is found dead in his bed, smothered with his own pillow. On his desk the police find newspaper cuttings about a murder case dating from the Second World War, when a young woman was found strangled behind Reykjavik's National Theatre. Konrad, a former detective, is bored with retirement and remembers the crime. He grew up in "the shadow district", a rough neighbourhood bordered by the National Theatre and an abattoir. Why would someone...

Inspector Erlendur returns in this international Bestseller Following an earthquake, the water level of an Icelandic lake suddenly falls, revealing a skeleton. Inspector Erlendur's investigation takes him back to the Cold War era, when bright, left-wing students in Iceland were sent to study in the "heavenly state" of Communist East Germany. Teeming with spies and informants, though, their "heavenly state" becomes a nightmare of betrayal and murder....