Erlendur, dour and seemingly unemotional, is still dealing with his drug-addicted children-daughter Eva Lind and son Sindri Snaer – his son now “clean,” and his daughter, who has suffered a miscarriage and undergone rehab, now back on drugs. Others become even more committed to their socialist and communist goals.Īs the two plot lines evolve and begin to overlap, investigators Erlendur, Sigurdur Oli, and Elinborg reveal more about their own personal lives, becoming far more developed than they have been in this series up to now. Some give up and leave the university to return to Iceland. They are expected to report on each other as part of “interactive surveillance,” in addition to attending compulsory “social” meetings and doing a week’s hard labor as “volunteers” during the summers, only to be spied up on themselves. The students who went to Leipzig in the 1970s and 1980s discovered life there to be more difficult than they had imagined. Switching back and forth in time between Erlendur’s current investigation, and the lives, thirty years ago, of a group of Icelandic students in Leipzig, Indridason brings the past into the present by reopening old cases and re-interviewing the people involved. With no other evidence available, Erlendur’s only hope of identifying the remains rests with his investigation of missing persons from the late 1970s and 1980s. For Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson, busy solving contemporary crimes, this past history has been unimportant, but when an earthquake leads to the unexpected draining of Lake Kleifarvatn, a skeleton, weighed down with a Russian transmitter, emerges from the depths, a large hole in its skull. At this time, many Icelandic young people were resentful of the US presence and its huge naval air station in Keflavik, accusing the US of “spreading filth.” While the US and NATO were using this base for strategic defense against possible USSR aggression, many students, often from poor families, were accepting the chance to study in East Germany at the University of Leipzig, then returning home with their socialist and communist messages. In the fourth o f the Inspector Erlendur series, Gold Dagger Award-winner Arnaldur Indridasson creates a challenging and thought-provoking mystery by revisiting the political complexities of Iceland during the height of the Cold War in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s an accident or a snap decision…committed for no reason.” “In Iceland there’s rarely a real motive behind a murder.

Note: Indridason was WINNER of the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel in 20, and WINNER of the Gold Dagger Award from the Crime Writers’ Association in 2005.

The draining lake arnaldur indridason