Reykjavík is a compelling cold-case mystery novel by bestselling author Ragnar Jónasson and Katrín Jakobsdóttir, who was Prime Minister of Iceland from 2017 to 2024. The authors have traditional Icelandic names which are patronymics, not family names, with "...son" meaning "son of..." and "...dóttir" meaning "daughter of..." It is considered correct to refer to them by their first names. Both authors are huge fans of Agatha Christie, and the book is dedicated to her. The novel, with its clever plot twists, is certainly worthy of her. It is largely set in the Icelandic capital of Reykjavík, in 1986, a year which is significant in the city's history because it marked the 200th anniversary of the city and because the summit between Reagan and Gorbachev took place there at that time. Both these events play important roles in the novel.
The book begins thirty years earlier, in 1956, with the disappearance of Lára, a teenage girl working as a maid for a lawyer and his wife on Videy, a small island off the coast of Reykjavík. Kristján Kristjánsson, the police officer in charge of the case, searches the island but can find no trace of Lára, either dead or alive, and she also has not gone home. He dismisses the possibility that she could have drowned herself, because she took all her luggage with her. Is she dead, or is she living somewhere under an assumed name? Kristján's superiors in the police force call him off the case because Lára's employer is a prominent individual and they don't want to stir up any trouble. And so, thirty years later, Lára's disappearance becomes Iceland's most famous unsolved case.
In 1986, amid Reykjavík's 200th anniversary celebrations, the young newspaper reporter Valur Róbertsson decides to solve the case. His editor, who sees it as a major scoop for the newspaper, encourages him. But he finds that no one close to the case is willing to tell him much. Kristján has been haunted by the case, and the fact that he was unable to solve it, for thirty years and he is clearly bitter because of his failure. He won't say much to Valur, but he does mention a lead he was unable to follow up on when the case was active.
Valur discovers that the clues, such as they are, point to a group of friends who met every weekend on the island of Videy during the time when Lára was there. One was her employer, and the others were a real estate developer, a city councillor, and a wholesaler who has recently died, and who was married to a famous actress. None of the living members of the group are willing to talk. The dead man's widow, the actress, is a little more helpful. At least she talks to Valur, but she won't provide any useful details, and she insists that her husband was innocent. The members of the group are all powerful men and very unlikable characters, and the only one with any redeeming characteristics is the dead man, but of course he is seen mostly through the eyes of his grieving widow.
And then Valur receives a call from a mysterious woman calling herself Júlía, who asks to meet with him and says she knows Lára is dead, and she also knows when Lára died and where her body is. But can he trust her? And is he putting himself in danger by following this lead?
The other main character in the book is Valur's sister, Sunna, a graduate student of comparative literature, working on her dissertation about an Icelandic author who translated Agatha Christie. (Katrín Jakobsdóttir also has a graduate degree in literature and wrote her thesis on a mystery author, so I wonder if Sunna might be, at least partially, an autobiographical character for her, even though Sunna would have been older than Katrín.) Valur lends Sunna his notebook to see if she can find anything he has overlooked. It is Sunna who eventually solves the case.
A shocking plot twist happens almost halfway through the book, which makes the book difficult to review because it's hard to write about the plot without giving away a major spoiler. I can only say that it took me completely by surprise at the time, but now I see why it happened. I was also taken by surprise by who the killer turned out to be, but looking back on it, I shouldn't have been. The clues are there, but hidden very well. This is definitely something Agatha Christie would have appreciated.
Ragnar and Katrín do an excellent job integrating the real-life events going on in Reykjavík in 1986 into the fictional plot of the novel. One of the highlights of the book is the 200th anniversary celebration, along with a 200-meter cake, and the climax of the book takes place during the Reagan/Gorbachev summit. Those of us, like myself, who grew up in the 1980s will feel very nostalgic while reading this book, with its references to 1980s films and to life before the internet and cell phones. Valur uses a typewriter and a handwritten notebook, and has to go to someone's house to call for a taxi.
The city itself is as much a character as any of the people, and Ragnar and Katrín show us how the city was changing at that time, with new neighborhoods, mostly for wealthier people, being built. Most of the suspects--all those unpleasant people who had been on the island at the time of Lára's disappearance--now live in these new housing developments. Reykjavík is also getting a new television station, the first one to be privately owned. Before this, the characters had very limited choices in what they could watch.
I highly recommend the book to anyone who enjoys a good mystery with plenty of twists and turns, and especially to fans of Agatha Christie and of Scandinavian mystery authors such as Stieg Larsson or Henning Mankell. This book does not contain as much graphic violence as the novels of Larsson or Mankell. I also recommend another of Ragnar's books, Snowblind, which is the first in his bestselling Dark Iceland series. I cannot tell which parts of this book are by Ragnar and which are by Katrín. My guess is that Ragnar wrote KristJán's and Valur's chapters, and Katrín wrote Sunna's chapters, especially if Sunna is a semi-autobiographical character, but this is only a guess. I can't see a difference in the writing style that would give it away, but of course this is a translation, done by one translator, so it is hard to tell. Certainly, the collaboration between the authors works very well. This does not appear to be the first in a series, so I don't know if they plan to write more books together.
Reykjavík is available from the Frances Willson Thompson Library Browsing Collection on the Flint campus. Library users on the Ann Arbor campus can request it using "Get This" in Library Search.