Book Log 2015 #23: Jar City by Arnaldur Indridason 

This is the third book in a series following Icelandic detective Erlendur Sveinsson, who is the stock representation of a police detective in Scandinavian noir fiction. In this case he's trying to solve the murder of a seventysomething man which apparently has links to a 30-plus year old death of a young girl.

I can't say I was too taken with this book. Erlendur is too much the bedraggled, world-weary murder cop, and the complicated relationship he has with his junkie daughter doesn't help. I also found the dialog pretty stilted, which I assume is an issue with translation. Finally, I found Elendur's approach to solving the crime - fart around for a while, and then have a hunch made out of seemingly nowhere pay off - to not be that rewarding. Again, maybe there was some nuance lost in translation, but in my reading things seemed to wrap up more or less at random.

The name of the book refers to a collection of unique medical samples that had gone from storage at a hospital into the hands of private collectors. This is treated as a pretty serious breach of trust, but I had a hard time mustering the same level of outrage (I suppose Iceland doesn't have a Mutter Museum). There's a sample that plays an important part in solving the case, which Erlendur has to recover for genetic testing. I've read that the genetic testing aspect of the book was a critique of biotech firm's attempt at creating a genetic database of Icelanders as part of finding ways to use genetic information to cure diseases. I didn't get that, but I also live in a country whose pluralistic nature is obvious. Were I from Iceland, and convinced of having a certain genetic solidarity with other Icelanders, I would likely have taken more away from Jar City on this front.

In any case, not a series I'll be racing to keep up with, though it does generate some interest by being set in Iceland if nothing else.