By Dennis Fischman

It’s strange that there’s a whole genre of mystery we call the “Nordic noir.” Scandinavia consists of six or eight different countries, after all, and we wouldn’t lump Miss Marple, Sherlock Holmes, Guido Brunetti, and Jimmy Perez together and call them “European detectives.”

Yet authors from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland have carved out their own swathe in the mystery landscape in the last few decades. It probably started with the Martin Beck series of novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, but American readers are more familiar with the later writers in the groove, like Jo Nesbø, Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), and Camilla Läckberg from Sweden; Jussi Adler-Olsen from Denmark; and the one I just began reading, Arnaldur Indriðason from Iceland.

“Jar City” by Arnaldur Indridason
Picador, 2000, 290 pages

Jar City is a police procedural with a troubled middle-aged detective, Inspector Erlendur, whose grown-up children are both struggling with drug addiction. He’s assisted by one male and one female police officer whose perspectives help him to see clues he might have missed (and who help us see his character better).

The plot revolves around three mysteries:

Who killed Holberg, a man accused of raping at least one woman and maybe more? What did the note found at the scene mean, “I am him”?

Was there something suspicious about the death of a four-year-old girl, Audur, in 1968, and her mother’s suicide a few years late? It was diagnosed as resulting from a brain tumor, but the drunk who made the diagnosis could have missed something important.

And why did the bride at a recent wedding run away, leaving a note that said, “HE’S A MONSTER WHAT HAVE I DONE”?

Content warning: This is a very dark mystery involving rape, incest, disease, suicide, and murder. In some ways, it’s a modern book: no one would have known about genetic diseases at all before 1900, and not by that name before 1950. In other ways, it feels very old-fashioned, because a 19th-century novelist would have written the same story and ascribed it to a curse, or bad blood. Only the means of detecting it would have been different.

Jar City is the third book of the Reykjavik Thriller series featuring Inspector Ellendur. I will certainly read the next book in the series, Silence of the Grave, and I would go back and visit the earlier two if they were available in the library.

Dennis Fischman is a member of the Somerville Public Library’s Mystery Book Club and an inveterate reader.