Unlikely Cohorts Invent Baffling Case

I commented just recently on the growing number of U.S. celebrities who’ve collaborated on books with name-brand crime novelists. Now comes news of the same sort from “the land of fire and ice.”

As Shotsmag Confidential reports, Ragnar Jónasson—one of today’s best-known Icelandic contributors to this genre—has written, together with his country’s 28th prime minister, Katrin Jakobsdóttir, a historical whodunit titled Reykjavik. Publisher Penguin Michael Joseph, which has taken on previous Jónasson novels, has acquired rights to this new work, and is preparing it for release in the UK in August 2023.

Reykjavik is being described as “a dual-narrative crime novel, following two strands of a mystery 30 years apart. In August 1956, a 14-year-old girl called Lara disappears from the island of Vidney, just off the coast of Reykjavik—and becomes Iceland’s most infamous unsolved case. In 1986, as Reykjavik celebrates its 200th anniversary, tabloid journalist Valur digs into her death.”

Katrín is no newcomer to this particular literary field: she apparently wrote her University of Iceland Master of Arts dissertation on the subject of Icelandic crime writing. The prime minister is quoted as saying: “It was a real pleasure and a thrill to write this crime novel set in Iceland in the year 1986 with my friend Ragnar Jónasson. When the world is full of extreme challenges it can be quite beneficial for the soul to stay for a moment in a fictional world belonging to another era and write about sordid crimes.”

We look forward to seeing the results of their partnership.

READ MORE: “‘It’s a Therapeutic Genre for Me’: Iceland’s PM Releases Debut Crime Novel,” by Jon Henley (The Guardian).