Michelle Blanchard Ardillo

The Mysterious Case of the Missing Crime Writer: A Mystery by Ragnar Jónasson (St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books, September 2025) is my first piece of Icelandic literature. I enjoyed it very much…until the very end. To say that the ending is abrupt and unsettling is an understatement. This is the second book I’ve read THIS MONTH that ends with an enormous cliffhanger, indicating with the subtlety of a freight train that there is a sequel coming. Later in the night (yes, I am a “stay up until you finish the book” reader) I realized that another sign that there is a sequel in the works wasn’t just what was on the last page, but also what wasn’t on the last page.

This morning, after doing a bit of research, I discovered that what I read is actually book #2 in a series. Well, now, I have to read book #1, Death at the Sanatorium (Minotaur Books, September 2024).

There’s a lot to like about this book, which is a missing person whodunit, is about the disappearance of mega-bestselling author Elín S. Jónsdóttir. She retired from writing after writing ten bestsellers in twenty years (meanwhile I am still working on a novel I started at least ten years ago) and is somewhat of a recluse, with only three good friends in her solitary world. One of the three good friends is her publisher.

Jónasson, a lawyer and writer in Reykjavik, does a great job setting the scene. The story takes place in Reykjavik and the main character is from Akureyi. Both locations are sketched out for the reader, the cold, the rain, the gloomy days, the architecture, the mountain trails for hiking. It made me yearn for a real visit to Iceland, not just the four-hour layover at the Reykjavik Airport I once had in 2000 on my way to Scotland.

The story does jump around quite a bit. There’s the current story of the missing author, but there’s also a missing police detective (the main character’s predecessor), a cold case stemming from a bank robbery and a dead bank teller, and flashbacks of an interview the missing author gave to a journalist. On top of all of that is the main character’s personal life, which is a very interesting part of the story.

Helgi Reykdal is a police detective on vacation in his hometown, sitting in the bookstore that was owned by his father, sold after his death, and then repurchased by Helgi years later. Helgi is an avid reader, and especially fond of murder mysteries from the Golden Age: Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, and Anthony Berkeley among others. He is called back to the capital to take on a missing person case, that of the most famous author in Iceland, being assigned to him because the whole police department knows he is a reader, something they don’t understand and mildly tease him about.

Helgi is also recovering from a traumatic time in his personal life. This part of the storyline is very interesting. It is also a time of “waiting for the other shoe to drop,” and Jónasson doesn’t disappoint with the creation of suspense here. Without giving away too much, I do feel that I should mention that there is an element of domestic abuse in this novel, which I assume readers of murder mysteries may have experienced violence of this type in the novels they’ve read. Still, I am giving the trigger warning all the same.

As I said, I liked this book quite a lot. It is a fast read, just a bit over 300 pages. It was interesting to read something from this part of the world, because most of the mysteries I read take place in the UK. I don’t read many translated works, so that was also an interesting element. I wish I had known it was book #2 of a series but as I was offered an ARC via NetGalley, I didn’t do much research beforehand. I also wish the ending had not been so abrupt (or distressing, to be honest), but that just means I must wait for book #3 to find out what happens on the very next page of Helgi’s story.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur for the ARC. And as they might say in Iceland (if Google is accurate!) “Njóttu lestursins!”