Arctic Chill

Arctic Chill 

by Arnaldur Indrisdason

On a bitter cold January day a young ten year
 old boy is found dead and frozen to the ground
 not far from the school yard where he spent his
days, and not far from the apartment he called
 home.
He was the second son of a Thai woman who
had come from her native land in marriage to a
local man in Reykjavik, Iceland. He was a happy
child for the most part who did well in school,
made friends easily, and whose life should not
 have ended in a pool of blood.

Immigrants to Iceland were becoming more numerous
 as they are in many parts of the world where there are available jobs. Similarly in Iceland the natives of the
country have mixed feeling about the influx of foreign
languages and cultures. Could this crime be racially motivated is asked again and again without much results. If not, how could this death be explained.

Erlendur and his team have to scratch the surface of a seemingly polite society to see what is not so obvious.

Meanwhile dealing with the death of a young boy, a
second son reminds him of the death of his own brother
as a child, lost in a blizzard, for which he still has not forgiven himself



This mystery is billed as a thriller, but I found the pace, the police procedural aspect of the unveiling of the facts to be slow and steady. The story is sensitively done and a very nice glimpse of the realities of life in Iceland.