This is short. Fast. A quick little thriller. Less like a novel and more like the sparse script for an episode of a Scandinavian police procedural. Would love to see this on screen with all that vast dark, desolate, and snowy landscape. 

For anyone (like me) who’s been planing a trip to Iceland (for over ten years and it hasn’t happened yet), this is a nice appetiser of setting and atmosphere. 

It’s good as a thriller too, and although sold as a single novel, it’s more of an introduction to a larger plot. In Jónasson’s writing style, everything happens in info dumps packed in fierce tiny bullets and fired rapidly in several directions.

Hulda’s perceptions are tainted by stereotypes and an environment rife with chauvinism, but you can’t blame her. She’s had a rough life and her glimpses of happiness have been short lived.  

The novel starts at the end—the very butt end—of Hulda’s career, and yet turns out to be the beginning of something more complex; the unfurling of a tightly clenched fist. By the end of this introductory novel, the palm of the hand is spread wide and the fingers are splayed out—and we realise there’s FAR more to this plot still to come…

Listened to the audiobook: a mere 5h22 short and ends on the precipice of an icy cliff… have #2 handy if you can…