2023-09-22 18:26:43
Sailfjordaccessible only by an old tunnel, is a small town that was a former herring fishing port in the decades of 1940 y 1950. After 1970 The herring fishery declines and this leads the town to its near disappearance, a small town where everyone trusts everyone, where the doors are never locked and where presumably nothing ever happens…until now, where the new police inspector He is murdered in cold blood on the outskirts of the city in the middle of a polar night battered by wind and rain, in a house where a tragedy has already occurred and where, today, uninhabited, it is used for retail.
This event causes unrest among the residents of the town and the police force itself. The companion of the deceased, Ari Thorwho was actually on sick leave due to the flu and was the one who should have been shot, faces the mystery with another former colleague, Thomaswhich comes from Reykjavík.
The setting of this mystery, detective novel, is a town where everyone knows each other and everyone is connected, in such a way that it becomes a wonderful cage where the cluedo game begins by discarding from the moment the reading begins. False clues, the nature of the place doing its thing, a notebook that speaks to us like a voice-over of mental problems and who will be the one who offers us the name of the murderer, are the setting for Ragnar’s slow style to take us to the outcome. It is not a book with a strident or large style, it is a book consistent in movements, with a slow but resounding cadence like the arrival of the polar night and with it the harsh winter of a city less than 46 kilometers for the arctic circle.
Under these premises there are major problems such as mental health, gender violence and influence peddling that somehow place the novel in the real moment and updated with the problems of any society.
Ragnar JónassonThe silenced truthEditorial: Six BarralTranslation: Kristinn R. Ólafsson Alda Ólafsson ÁlvarezPrecio: 19,50 €
So Ragnar Jónasson has once again shown that his style is already a classic. His beginnings at the age of seventeen were translating Agatha Christie into Icelandic and with The Shadow of Fear (Six Barral), began his journey with the first novel of Black Iceland, where we were already in Siglufjördur, with Ari, and now, with the penultimate novel of the saga we once again relive the loneliness and the cold, the darkness, its nature and the harshness of This, the perspective of the protagonist, his stillness despite his internal storms and how that innocent Ari has evolved and grown and has become someone more cynical who is more suspicious of others. Ragnar also becomes sensitive and it is not the first time that he exposes in his texts the fact of violence in the home and even the amount of weapons that exist in Iceland per capita.
Recommended novel for those who want to know and delve into the authentic Nordic crime novel, one that moves away from great rivers of blood and the color red and delves into the great problems of society, social issues and where the author studies the characters in depth. Although it is not necessary to read the books that precede it in the saga to enjoy this one, the whole gives a more complete vision of the character, the work and, of course, the author.
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