Former Reykjavík police detective Konrád continues to fail at retirement in Icelandic crime fiction titan Arnaldur Indriðason's The Quiet Mother, translated by Philip Roughton. Indriðason (The Darkness Knows; The Girl by the Bridge) has skillfully plotted another soulful vehicle for the mononymous Konrád, whose professional determination, as ever, twines with a personal objective.
The novel opens with the murder of the elderly Valborg in the apartment where she lived alone. The detective who arrives on the scene, Marta, spots among the notes on Valborg's desk "a phone number that she knew well" and calls it. Konrád answers and explains that he met the victim two months earlier: she contacted him after reading about one of his celebrated cases. Valborg told Konrád that she was getting her affairs in order because she was terminally ill and wanted his help finding the child she gave up decades earlier. Konrád's guilt over his refusal to help the now-dead Valborg animates his headlong search for her adult child.
The Quiet Mother's roving perspective accommodates Konrád; Marta, who finds his intrusiveness into her murder case exasperating; and Konrád's friend Eygló, who conducts her own investigation into a matter that knocks into his. Once again, Indriðason's readers should come prepared for coincidence as a plot device and also for the foregrounding of a social issue, in this case reproductive rights. While Konrád hunts for the dead woman's child, he continues to pursue the truth about his miscreant father's murder, which readers will understand is also the reluctant retiree's search for himself. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer