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allisonhollingsworth 's review for:
Snowblind
by Ragnar Jónasson
“If there was anything Ari Thór had learned during his short time in Siglufjördur, it was that secrets were liable to spread with astonishing speed in such a small community.”
Ari Thor gets a job as a police officer - one of the few in the small Iceland town of Siglugfjordur - and has to leave behind his girl friend to travel to it, to a remote town that sometimes gets blocked off from the rest of the country when the weather gets bad. Even though he’s told by the other players in town that nothing bad ever really happens there, when Ari Thor gets there, he’s thrown into a murder mystery that he has to help solve. Not only is a notorious writer pushed down the stairs and killed, but a woman is found shirtless outside her home, nearly dead. And Ari Thor gets a call from someone on the phone that sounds like he’s asking for help. This book started off really strong. I was curious about the phone call and there were a couple of short chapters with an unnamed narrator who was being held up in her home. But those chapters were sort of a red herring, alluding to something Karl had done a long time ago - Karl had the main role in a play the town was throwing and he was responsible for nearly killing his wife and was going to claim the insurance money. The play felt like it came out of nowhere; it felt like we didn’t hear about it until partway into the book, and the characters in it play an important part in the book. I guess I would have like the introductions to those characters more early on. I did like how each character played some sort of part in the mystery. We found out the famous writer was actually a cheat, and he died because he got into a fight with the son of the real writer, and so his death was kind of an accident, and Ari Thor thinks about the injustice that Karl escapes being charged while another person is charged with a death that was an accident. This is a series, so there’s a suggestion at the end that there’s more that the characters are up to, and personally Ari Thor is in some trouble because he cheated on his girlfriend, who decided to go up and visit him. I’m interested in seeing what happens, but I’m not chomping at the bit for the next book. The second book might be more fast paced though, because this book did have a lot of character info dumps but in the next one we already know who they are. One thing that was interesting is the setting of Iceland and the references to their government, like the protests in Reykjavik, and I had to remind myself the book didn’t take place in the US. I was also expecting the book to be more of a wilderness thriller because of the title, so that threw me off.
Ari Thor gets a job as a police officer - one of the few in the small Iceland town of Siglugfjordur - and has to leave behind his girl friend to travel to it, to a remote town that sometimes gets blocked off from the rest of the country when the weather gets bad. Even though he’s told by the other players in town that nothing bad ever really happens there, when Ari Thor gets there, he’s thrown into a murder mystery that he has to help solve. Not only is a notorious writer pushed down the stairs and killed, but a woman is found shirtless outside her home, nearly dead. And Ari Thor gets a call from someone on the phone that sounds like he’s asking for help. This book started off really strong. I was curious about the phone call and there were a couple of short chapters with an unnamed narrator who was being held up in her home. But those chapters were sort of a red herring, alluding to something Karl had done a long time ago - Karl had the main role in a play the town was throwing and he was responsible for nearly killing his wife and was going to claim the insurance money. The play felt like it came out of nowhere; it felt like we didn’t hear about it until partway into the book, and the characters in it play an important part in the book. I guess I would have like the introductions to those characters more early on. I did like how each character played some sort of part in the mystery. We found out the famous writer was actually a cheat, and he died because he got into a fight with the son of the real writer, and so his death was kind of an accident, and Ari Thor thinks about the injustice that Karl escapes being charged while another person is charged with a death that was an accident. This is a series, so there’s a suggestion at the end that there’s more that the characters are up to, and personally Ari Thor is in some trouble because he cheated on his girlfriend, who decided to go up and visit him. I’m interested in seeing what happens, but I’m not chomping at the bit for the next book. The second book might be more fast paced though, because this book did have a lot of character info dumps but in the next one we already know who they are. One thing that was interesting is the setting of Iceland and the references to their government, like the protests in Reykjavik, and I had to remind myself the book didn’t take place in the US. I was also expecting the book to be more of a wilderness thriller because of the title, so that threw me off.