Oops!  Here’s another book which I wish I had abandoned after the first few chapters.  ‘Reykjavik’ is a contemporary thriller in which a journalist and his literary sister set out to solve a 30 year old disappearance of a 15 year old girl named Lara.  Lara had gone to the island of Vildey a short boat ride from the eponymous capitol to be the housekeeper for a young couple spending the summer there, and one night in the summer sof 1956 she simply disappeared.

Iceland had been obssessed with this disappearance for three decades since her fate had never been determined.  Did she flee her quiet life and was living somewhere in the world, happily and secretly?  Or had she been murdered on Vildey or after returning to Reykjavik that summer night?  The policeman who had initially investigated the disappearance had dwelled on these questions since 1956, but no clues had resurfaced until Valur Robertsson, an intrepid reporter for a daily newspaper, began to dig into the history and the details.  When he was killed in a suspicious motor accident, his sister took up the investigation and brought it to an exciting end.

Sounds great, right?  Not so. The plot was credible but at the end of the story, it was a bit ho-hum.  The characters were rather flat.  The writing was painful in places, e.g. ‘As the evening sun cast its enchanted glow over the wide bay of Skjalfandi, touching the snow-capped muntains with pink, she felt overwhelmed by an almost palpable sense of grief and loss…Husavik had never looked lovelier, the colourful fishing boats in the harbour, the wooden houses on the docks, the distinctive Swiss-chalet-style church and the burnt-orange and green slopes of the mountain, all luminous in the rays of the setting sun.”  Ugh!  In addition, the translation from the Icelandic to American English was uneven with some phrases totaling missing the mark, e.g. ‘lie-in’ for sleeping late.

In choosing the book after a rather glowing NYT review and a friend’s recommendation was that it was written by a twosome, not an absolute negative in itself, but a warning sign.  What should have been a flashing red light was that while one of the authors is one of Iceland’s best mystery writers, his partner is Iceland’s Prime Minister, another example of trying to turn political fame into authorial gold ala the Clintons.  There was the Bill Clinton/ James Patterson team and the Hillary Clinton/Louise Penny effort neither of which I’ve read, but I didn’t need to in order to conclude these were not partnerships based on authorial talent but name recognition and book sales.  Why established mystery writers like these feel the need (other than $$$) to take on writing novices with big names is beyond me.

This partnership didn’t work either.  Even though we finally learn what happened to Lara after wading through a veritable phone directory of unpronounceable Icelandic patronyms, it’s not worth the effort.  By the way, the NYT Crime columnist, Sarah Weinman, felt quite differently writing that the book “qualifies as a breakout: seamlessly plotted, with terrific characters and plenty of surprising, earned twists.” and especially complimenting the translation.  To further jar me, she has now named this book one of the “Year’s Best Crime Novels” .  My disagreement with Weinman (and one of my best sources of recommendations who also loved the book) reminds me that my grandmother used to say “That’s why there’s chocolate and vanilla.”  As for this book, I’d take a pass.