This book, another in the Inspector Erlendur series set in Iceland, opens several days before Christmas at a busy hotel in downtown Reykjavik. The hotel is packed with tourists, anxious to experience real arctic Christmas, but that doesn’t concern Erlendur or his partners Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg. They have got an unusual murder to investigate and an uncooperative staff to deal with. You see, the hotel doorman and resident Santa Claus has been found in his room with his pants around his ankles, a condom on […]
Unopposed, I enter Hell
“To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists, may each and every one of us always give the devil his due.” Destiny calls the family together, the first time they have all been together in a long while. Pretty soon Death is needling on Dream about his abhorrent behavior towards Nada. She tells him he must make this right. You remember: Nada rejected him, saying she didn’t want to be his queen, so he banished her to hell. And that was […]
m m mmmmuurderrrrrrrrrrrrrer
“If you’re innocent you have nothing to fear. Right?” Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Oh so wrong. Nora, a crime fiction writer, gets an email one day inviting her to the Hen Party weekend (the British equivalent of a Bachelorette Party) of Clare Cavendish. This is a bit of a shock, as Nora has not seen Clare for 10 years. Back then, they were best friends and had been since they were in the first grade and the beautiful and popular Clare had chosen her, Leonora, […]
We have a history together that hasn’t happened yet.
This is one of those books that seemed to constantly be in my peripheral vision. It was on a gazillion “best of” lists and it pops up with regularity whenever I order a book on Amazon. As I gaze at the cover I see it won a Pulitzer and a National Book Critics Circle Award. But the thing is, I had never read anything about the book, not one single review. I don’t know if it would have saved me the trouble of reading this […]