Police detective Erlendur stands in a basement flat over the body of an old guy named Holberg. Someone bashed in Holberg’s head with a glass ashtray. Nothing has been taken from the flat. So the killing doesn’t look like a burglary gone wrong. Plus there is a cryptic note left on the body.

(For no reason, the author doesn’t reveal the contents of the note until page 116. This kept me scanning back through chapters I’d already read, trying to see if I’d somehow missed it.)

A stoic man in his fifties, Erlendur smokes a cigarette, and ponders what could have happened. His assistants trade theories. Elinborg is a calm woman in her forties who can establish a warm rapport with almost anyone. High-strung Sigurdur Oli, in his thirties, is obsessed with buying fine fashion and trendy gadgets for his home.

Erlendur goes home only to have his troubled daughter Eva Lind drop by. Years ago, Erlendur initiated an acrimonious divorce for which his ex-wife still hates him. Both of his children have grown up to be drug-addicted losers who resent him. Eva Lind contacts him sometimes to ask for money. Even so, he senses that, unlike her brother, she still hopes to build a relationship with him. In his fumbling and impatient way, he tries to encourage this.

Tonight, Eva Lind predictably asks him for money. They argue, and he guesses that she’s pregnant. She leaves his flat, and runs out into the night, leaving him even more worried than before.

The next day, Erlendur has to investigate a second case: a bride who disappeared from her own wedding. She, too, has left a cryptic note behind. He rejoins Sigurdur Oli on the Holberg case and they search the dead man’s flat. The only strange thing they find is a photograph of a little girl’s grave. From this, they learn from official records that the girl died of a brain tumor when she was four, and her mother committed suicide three years later.

Who are the mother and child, and what is their connection with Holberg? Suddenly the case seems to be more than what Erlendur refers to as a “typical, clumsy Icelandic murder.”

He and his assistants descend into a twisty plot involving a serial rapist, illegitimate children, body organs stolen during autopsies, missing persons, genetic diseases, and a scientific project to map the Icelandic genetic pool. At the same time, Erlendur must find the missing bride from the unrelated case, and help his daughter with her shaky efforts to escape the dangerous life of a drug addict.

This is an eccentric book in that the crime-scene note is withheld from the reader for so long. Likewise, there is a retired cop (and very minor character) whom Erlendur consults named Marion Briem; the author goes to great lengths to make Briem’s gender ambiguous. All to no effect that I could see. But Jar City is well-written and well-plotted, and will keep you up late reading!

Jar City is the first book in the Erlendur/Reykjavik series, but can be read as a stand-alone. (The sequel Silence of the Grave is even better.) It can be found on Amazon through this link: Jar City: A Reykjavik Thriller