This was dull. Nothing very much happened, and it happened slowly, and repetitively, and in flat affectless prose. Is it a sort of reflection of the slow pace of Icelandic life? I don’t know.
A skeleton turns up buried deep in the ground on a building site on the outskirts of Reykjavik. The police call in some archaeologists to dig it up. They take ages. While they’re wielding their little trowels and brushes, the police patiently build up a picture of who the skeleton might belong to. Turns out it’s buried near the site of a long-gone shabby dwelling, so candidates are people connected to that dwelling back in the second world war years. Its owner was a man whose fiancée vanished mysteriously; its occupants were a horrible man involved in shady black-market dealings with the nearby American military base, and the wife and three kids he horribly abused.
Alongside the present day police plodding, we also get told the tale of the occupants at the time of their occupancy. But not the tale of the owner. This makes it seem pretty obvious that the skeleton is going to be one of the occupants, not the owner’s fiancée. Further, we know early on that the skeleton is adult. So it’s either the horrible man or his poor wife. So the reader has a fair inkling that the police work involving the owner is redundant. Further, narratively, the police work involving the occupants is pretty redundant, because we basically get told everything twice, once in the present day, once in the past. The police find out that the man beat his wife. We know! We just read about it. The police find out he was stealing from the base. We know! Etc. Oh, and one of the police officers spends a lot of time at the bedside of his comatose daughter, musing on his stereotypically bleak family life past and present.
In the end, what seems obvious about the skeleton’s identity turns out to be right, notwithstanding some fairly feeble attempts at misdirection towards the owner’s fiancée. And the police don’t even find this out themselves; one of the abused kids, now adult, turns up out of the blue and tells them what happened.
Although it’s on the short side, around 290 pages, this would have been better even shorter. Cut all the stuff in the past and all the officer’s daughter stuff and make it a brisk procedural. Simenon gets away with this in the Maigret novels; the prose is pancake flat, there’s very little drama, it’s all very methodical, but then it’s done in 150 pages and that’s just fine (that’s how you write 75 of the buggers). Probably can’t get away with that in today’s industry, but I wish Indriðason’s editor had been braver.