A review by marilynsaul
Silence of the Grave by Arnaldur Indriðason

1.0

I was immediately disappointed when the gravesite was located and the authorities started prying the bones out of the side of a trench. I kept screaming (silently) "you've got to come down from the top or you lose all the information!!!". Thankfully, they brought in the archaeologist, but that turned into a nightmare of bad archaeology - no grave pit discernible because it was removed by construction excavation? ("well, except for the undisturbed part, you idiots"); takes 5+ days to excavate down to the remains, examining every tiny bit of soil for clues ("oh, for heaven's sake!"); they bring in a geologist to determine from the trench profile the age of the burial ("In what world do you live? Have you ever even TALKED to a geologist??? They look at much bigger pictures than the subtle stratigraphy of a gravesite!") Ok. You guessed it. I'm an archaeologist; I specialized in burials; I'm also educated in forensics. I thought I could overlook this heinous excavation, but the hundreds of pages of a man beating up on his wife, along with the story of the drug-addled daughter of the detective just wore me down. Who finds this stuff interesting? There are much better books, much better writers out there to explore. I've moved on.