Frozen Assets by Quentin Bates
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gunnhilder Gisladottir known as Gunna the cop, is the head of a two person police force in a small town about an hour from Reykjavik, Iceland. A body is fished out of the waters in her town and while it seems that he fell into the water after over imbibing . Gunna is being pressed by her superiors in Reykjavik to accept this scenario but she feels that unless he had wings there was no way from him to have travelled to her locality on foot. Murder, then is what she begins to investigate getting resistance from everyone she interviews as well as her boss.




Gunna has two children and lost her husband  several years before in an incident she refuses to discuss. She is no push over. When a second man is found dead she moves into higher gear and begins to realize that she is on the trail of a cunning cold-blooded killer.

Despite the fact that the murderer is elusive and crafty she is soon on his trail a and the authorities are forced to fall in behind her even though what she is really following is also a trail to high level corruption.



The book is billed as a thriller. I found it to be a leisurely walk that begins to pick up pace toward the end of the story. I enjoyed the book and look forward to reading COLD COMFORT the next in the series.

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.