Rating: 2/5
Review:
A disappointment
I have enjoyed a few of Arnaldur Indridason's Erlendur
novels. I'm afraid that I didn't think
that The Shadow District, the beginning of a new series, was nearly so good.
The story is told largely in two time frames: in present day
Reykjavik an elderly man is found
dead, and turns out to have been smothered.
He has cuttings which relate to a murder in Reykjavik
during World War Two. Konrad, a retired
policeman, begins to investigate both the present day killing and the wartime
murder. Intercut with this is the story
of the investigation of that murder by two policeman at the time. The stories develop in parallel, as links and
new revelations slowly (painfully slowly) begin to be revealed.
For me, the whole thing lacked much credibility and the pace
is positively funereal. I'm all for
slow, atmospheric plots, provided that what is around the plot itself is
interesting and involving. Here it felt
plodding and rather turgid. The history
of wartime Iceland
is rather interesting, I suspect, but there were so many lengthy expositions
(often rather repetitive) and long, long back-stories of lots of characters
that it became rather a slog. The sudden,
late introduction of a third timeframe, told from the point of view of the
present-day victim to explain what happened to him seemed very contrived, and a
conveniently neat and thoroughly implausible confession made the ending seem a
bit silly.
The translation doesn't help. It's not terrible, but the prose feels a bit
stilted and often pretty stale, with clunky clichés like "he nearly jumped
out of his skin" or "they talked about everything under the sun"
cropping up far too regularly.
So, a disappointment for me.
I won't be bothering with any more in the Konrad series, and can't
really recommend this.
(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)
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