JAR CITY Arnaldur Indridason 2005 ISBN:0312340702 St. Martin’s Minotaur

There are times when, instead of proffering one’s own words about an authors writing, it is best to proffer the authors own words from the book in question. As you may well have guessed, this is one of those times. I give you a passage from Arnaldur Indridason’s JAR CITY in which his world weary yet compassionate protagonist Erlendur Sveinsson philosophizes about the brutality of the cases he’s seen in his many years as a detective inspector in Reykjavik:

You think it won’t effect you. You reckon you’re strong enough to withstand that sort of thing. You think you can put on armour against it over the years and can watch all the filth from a distance as if it’s none of your business, and try to keep your sense. But there isn’t any distance. And there’s no armour. No-one’s strong enough. The repulsion haunts you like an evil spirit that burrows into your mind and doesn’t leave you in peace until you believe that the filth is life itself because you’ve forgotten how ordinary people live. This case is like that. Like an evil spirit that’s been unleashed to run riot in your mind and ends up leaving you crippled.

Everyone life touches upon a life in Iceland. Every crime has personal elements. The death of a lone man of sixty-nine years, head bludgeoned, note reading “I am him” on his chest, is approached with the meticulous and slow exploration of an entomologist with a new specimen. The victim, Holberg, had long ago been a perpetrator. Rapes of young women over thirty years before were attributed to him but the man slipped threw judicial fingers.

The note and the victims history are the only clues. They lead Erlendur to scratch surfaces long left ignored and a cold case sprouts from the dust. Victims from long ago tell their stories as if for the first time. From the victims are the seeds, the very essence of an old man’s guilt and the genesis of his violent death. The answer lies preserved, found long ago and waiting to be found again by a detective tenacious and pedantic enough to find it. JAR CITY is a beautiful and timeless police procedural wrought with rare skill and empathy.

Jennifer Jordan