Death at the Sanatorium by Ragnar Jónasson

 

First Lines: 2012. Helgi. The despairing silence was broken.

1983. Two deaths in a former sanatorium rock a community in northern Iceland. A nurse, Yrsa, is murdered. Detective Hulda Hermannsdóttir and her boss, Sverrir, are the investigators. There are plenty of suspects: the chief physician, two junior nurses, a young doctor, and the caretaker, who is arrested but subsequently released. 

Less than a week after the murder, the chief physician is found dead, apparently from a fall from a sanatorium balcony. Sverrir rules his death as suicide, assumes he was guilty of the nurse's murder, and closes the case.

2012. Young police officer Helgi Reykdal has been studying criminology in the UK but returns to Iceland to accept a job at the Reykjavik police department-- the job Hulda Hermannsdóttir is about to retire from. Helgi is also a collector of Golden Age detective stories and is writing his thesis on the 1983 murders in the north. Deciding to meet with the original suspects, he soon finds silence and suspicion at every turn as he works to solve the thirty-year-old mystery.

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Ragnar Jónasson's Hidden Iceland trilogy (The Darkness, The Island, The Mist) featuring Hulda Hermannsdóttir is one of my all-time favorites, so I was pleased to see that Hulda would make an appearance in Death at the Sanatorium. Granted, it's more of a cameo, but she does make an impact, and her appearance is bittersweet for those readers who have read the Hidden Iceland trilogy. (Do you need to read that trilogy before reading this book? Absolutely not.)

 

Jónasson has translated Agatha Christie into Icelandic, and his familiarity with her work is obvious in his meticulous plotting. When it comes to plots, this man is a master weaver. But Death at the Sanatorium isn't all about the story. Jónasson is also a master at atmospheric settings, and you can't get much better than setting a murder mystery in an old tuberculosis sanatorium. I have a special sympathy for this setting because my mother was a patient in one when I was a baby. I'm very familiar with the photographs taken there-- especially the one of my grandfather holding me up to the window, me reaching futilely for my mother, and the look on my mother's face on the other side of the glass.

Plot? Check. Setting? Check. What about the characters?

It didn't take me long to want to throttle the young nurse, Linna. She enjoyed being an important witness, and she wasn't above stretching the truth. "The truth was that life was easier if you tweaked the facts a little in your favor." See what I mean?

Helgi is the star here. His father was an antiquarian bookseller, and Helgi has a fantastic library of detective fiction, in particular translated detective fiction, that was lovingly collected by both his grandfather and father. Those books-- as well as his investigation into the 1983 deaths at the sanatorium-- are his escape, and he does need one, as readers soon learn.

The ending of Death at the Sanatorium made me smile in appreciation of the author's skill. It also made me want to see Helgi again because I hope that he can solve yet another murder.

Death at the Sanatorium by Ragnar Jónasson

Translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb.

eISBN: 9781250770776

Minotaur Books © 2024

eBook, 320 pages

 

Standalone Thriller

Rating: A+

Source: Net Galley