Icelandic Crime Fiction

1995: A young German woman disappears in the Westfjords of Iceland, but the case is quickly forgotten. After all, it's not uncommon for foreigners who come to Iceland to vanish, and the police are too busy investigating a fatal car accident, recovering two bodies from the cold waters of the sea. 2022: Detective Hildur Rúnarsdóttir returns from a surfing holiday in Hawaii to a good life.

The renovation of her childhood home is progressing, and her colleague and friend Jakob Johanson has permanently joined her in Iceland. But when Hildur visits her family friend, Helga, in a nursing home, she is presented with surprising new details about her mother, Rakel. Then a cruise ship carrying a large group of tourists arrives in Ísafjörður, bringing a world of trouble with them.

As the bodies pile up, Hildur and Jakob must look to the past to figure out what lies in front of them.

Tense and dark, each of these three crime books is the first in their series. There are two police procedurals by Icelandic author Yrsa Sigurdardottir and Finnish author Satu Rämö, and a missing person search that eventually stretches over five books by Lilja Sigurdardottir.

The titles in Gumshoe Book "where do I start" bundles are deliberately chosen to help you find new binge-worthy authors and series. 

Sometimes murder runs in the family. Or so the police think...

When a well-known artist is found in Snorri’s Pool with an axe buried deep in his chest, Stella Blómkvist is immediately thrown in at the deep end, brought in to defend the apparently harmless young man the police have in their sights as the killer.

The man’s mother had spent time in prison, convicted of killing her personal trainer, despite her protestations of innocence. Stella can’t help being drawn into both the cold case and this fresh murder, with a trail of guilt that stretches halfway across the world.

As if she doesn’t have enough to keep her busy, Stella’s also pursuing a political high-flyer suspected of being a serial rapist, and defending a senior police officer of corruption charges that have all the hallmarks of a vendetta. 

But the toughest challenges Stella faces are among her own loved ones…

After a day of simmering tension on a trip to an uninhabited island, Júlia snaps and leaves her husband Gíó marooned in the middle of a freezing fjord in the depths of the Icelandic winter, with night drawing in.

When she regrets her decision and returns, he is nowhere to be found...

Dóra struggles to cope with life after taking a bullet to the head. Rado is the child of refugees, his career shunted off the tracks due to his family connections to an rganised crime gang. But they’re the only ones available when a troubled teenager vanishes from a school trip, and the trail gets darker the further they pursue it.

Broken takes place in a side of Reykjavík no visitor would ever want to see, as the mismatched pair tread on all the wrong toes in the search for the missing youngster.