A review by juliebean1020
Snowblind by Ragnar Jónasson

2.0

While I am used to most Nordic crime being on the noir side, I should not have been surprised that this was almost a cozy. After all, before taking up writing mystery novels himself, Jonasson spent years translating a good portion of Agatha Christie into Icelandic. But, dark or light, I did enjoy the first half of the book for the most part. Then it began devolving. The characters started behaving like petulant children. We don't develop their backstories through investigation by the police, we have third person data dumps whose sole purpose is to spread red herrings far and wide. Rather than a "lone wolf" (which is what I think the author was trying for), the protagonist is a loose cannon. And then the author commits the cardinal sin of having our policeman suddenly stop thinking anything through "out loud" and to hoard information not available to the reader. There is potential in this first in a series, but not much else.