ANNA CREER reviews two new Nordic Noir thrillers.

Iceland has been voted the safest place to live in the world 12 times. On average, there’s only one murder committed each year. 

However, Icelandic crime writers ignore these statistics, writing relentlessly dark stories of crimes of passion, serial killers and the dangers of the environment.

Ragnar Jonasson, who has a law degree and works as an investment banker while writing crime fiction, is considered one of the most successful writers of Nordic Noir. 

He is the award-winning author of the international bestselling Hulda series and the Dark Iceland series. His international best seller The Darkness is being adapted for TV, while Ridley Scott is producing Outside as a feature film. 

Death at the Sanatorium begins in 1983 at a sanatorium outside Akureyri, in the north of Iceland. Once it had been a hospital that treated patients with tuberculosis, which had been one of the biggest killers in Iceland. 

Treatment meant isolating patients from the public, with plenty of rest and fresh air. The sanatorium outside Akureyri had been built after the one in Reykjavik could take no more.

Now only one wing of the hospital remains open with six employees: two doctors, two nurses, a research assistant and a caretaker.

One of the two nurses is found brutally murdered, the caretaker is accused but, when a week later one of the doctors ends his life, it’s considered a confession and the case is declared closed.

Thirty years later, Helgi Reykdal has returned to Reykjavik to complete his degree in criminology. He has already been offered a job by the Icelandic serious crimes unit. 

He’s writing his thesis on the deaths at the sanatorium because “viewed with a modern eye there were some obvious question marks hanging over the conclusions of the original police investigations.”

When one of the surviving sanatorium staff members is murdered, Helgi is authorised by the police to officially investigate the cold case of 30 years earlier.

Told over two major timelines and from multiple perspectives, Death at the Sanatorium is a cleverly crafted whodunit. 

Jonasson is fascinated by the golden age of crime fiction, even translating 14 of Agatha Christie’ s novels before turning to crime writing himself. As a result, his novels reflect the classic style of the past.

PASCAL Engman, on the other hand, has been variously described as the rising star of Swedish crime fiction, the new Swedish crime-writing sensation and the best-selling Swedish author in the millennial generation.

Engman, although initially a journalist, published his debut standalone novel, The Patriots in 2017, before beginning a series about police detective Vanessa Frank. Of the four titles published in Sweden only two have been translated into English. The Widows is the second after Femicide, which won the 2023 Petrona Award for outstanding Nordic crime fiction.

The Widows begins with an undercover policeman murdered in a Stockholm park. Nearby, the police discover the body of a young woman. The initial investigation focuses on the death of the policeman but Vanessa Frank recognises the body of the young woman and begins a personal, tandem investigation into her death.

Vanessa Frank works in the National Homicide Unit. Her boss, Mikael Kask, considers her one of the best detectives he has worked with. She’s brave and works hard but “kept her distance from her colleagues. A lot of people though she was difficult, but not Mikael. He was fascinated by her. She was charismatic in her own subtle way. And she was beautiful”.

Engman skilfully weaves together multiple seemingly disconnected narrative threads. A father is guilt ridden after his nine-year-old son is critically injured by a hit-and-run driver; Nicholas is working as a bodyguard, protecting the family of Johan Karlstrom, the head of one of Europe’s largest online gambling business; Molly Berg, a high-class escort, becomes the unwitting witness to the murder of a politician, while Hamza Mansour intervenes to save the life of his old teacher from a gang of teenagers.

Eventually the threads and the characters combine, as Engman’s novel explores the most frightening of threats in the modern world.

Engman makes his intention in The Widows clear in his epigraph from Omni News, which reported that: “At least 400 ISIS terrorists have been trained to commit atrocities in Europe. They have been organised in different cells to carry out a wave of bloody attacks”.

The Widows is a slow burner but persevere because it gathers pace with a climax worthy of any Hollywood action thriller.