You want it darker. We kill the flame.

26. Black Skies – Arnaldur Indridason

So the first entry in the Inspector Erlendur series I read was not focused on Inspector Erlendur…oops. Sigurdur Oli, the somewhat of a jackass partner to Erlendur is the one investigating here and he was actually pretty easy to follow for me, since he likes US things like baseball and US TV and rock and roll, so if you’re from the US and get arrested in Iceland, try to find this fictional character so you’ll feel more comfortable. And, weirdly, he gets into quite the to-do by going to his college reunion – which also is a popular plot line in the US even though for us it’s usually high school reunions because more traumatic things happened there for most US people. Things that make you want to claim you invented Post-Its.

However, this is Iceland so instead of Romy and Michelle’s bubbly awesomeness, the familiarity of the reunion plot concept is broken by extortion, an outdoors excursion that ended in murder, a swinger’s group gone very wrong, and, the kicker, this other story line involving a homeless man who was abused as a child making a leather mask so he can murder his tormentor using a very old school method of slaughtering calves. This shit is bleak. I’m very sure Romy and Michelle could also have helped with their on the spot ingenuity – perhaps a newly choreographed dance with Allen Cumming to Leonard Cohen’s last single “You Want It Darker” would have helped via massive distraction, but that’s not how it works in Reykjavik.

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This is the book Thorfinnur’s name came from. It means thunderous Finn, and since he succeeded Finny mostly because he looks like Finny and he has turned out to be very, very loud and demanding like Finny, it’s appropriate.