Into Oblivion

Starred review from December 14, 2015
Set in Iceland in 1979, several years after the events of 2015’s Reykjavík Nights, Indriðason’s elegantly crafted procedural traces two parallel cases: recently divorced Erlendur Sveinsson’s private investigation of the disappearance of a school girl named Dagbjört a quarter-century earlier; and his professional probe, with his enigmatic mentor Marion Briem, of the mysterious death of Kristvin, an Icelandic mechanic who worked at Naval Air Station Keflavík, a large American military installation with an active black market between base personnel and locals. Erlendur can no more forget Dagbjört’s case than he can the soul-scourging event of his own childhood, the loss of his younger brother in a raging upland snowstorm, and his near unbearable grief at the loss of his five-year-old daughter through divorce. Marion, who finds Erlendur’s stubbornness endearing, also suffers the bitterest pangs of loss in this accomplished analysis of the painful price that people of honor pay in a world swiftly losing its humanity.