At the rate Ragnar Jónasson is going, it will soon be easier to list the Icelandic noir titles he hasn't written than the ones he has. To his chiseled and frequently chilling body of work he adds Death at the Sanatorium, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb, and a spin-off of his novel The Darkness.
It's 2012, and Reykjavík-based Helgi Reykdal is writing his dissertation for his master's degree in criminology. His subject is a decades-old cold case: one morning in 1983, a nurse arrived at work--a patient-free former tuberculosis hospital being used for research by a small staff--and found another nurse dead, two fingers cut off. A second staff death on the premises a week later was written off by the police--lazily, as Helgi sees it--as a suicide. The novel skitters around in time, airing the viewpoints of the surviving sanatorium staff, whom Helgi interviews, ostensibly for his dissertation. The truth? He's bent on getting to the bottom of the two sanatorium deaths.
Death at the Sanatorium is a wily bit of thriller business that includes a few fleeting appearances by Hulda Hermannsdóttir, the formidable detective who drives Jónasson's Hidden Iceland series (The Darkness; The Island; The Mist); her scenes make up one of two personal-story arcs that the novel leaves tantalizingly unresolved. The shifting timelines and perspectives keep the question "How will this figure into things?" percolating, as does Helgi's curious obsession with golden-age detective novels. At one point he rhapsodizes that they offer "pure escapism." Gratifyingly, Jónasson's books offer more. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer