Erlendur #10

Detective Sigurdur Oli is in trouble. After a school reunion exposes the chasm between his life and those of his much more successful contemporaries, leaving him bitter and resentful, one of his old friends asks him to pay an unofficial visit to a couple of blackmailers. He readily agrees, only to arrive to find one of the pair lying in a pool of blood. When the victim dies in hospital, Sigurdur Oli is faced with investigating a murder without revealing his own reasons for being present at the murder scene.

Moving from the villas of Reykjavik’s banking elite to a sordid basement flat, Black Skies is a superb story of greed, pride, and murder from one of Europe’s most successful crime writers.

• Selected as the best crime novel of the year in the Netherlands 2011 by Vrij Netherland
• Shortlisted for the 2013 Petrona Award for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year in UK
• Selected as one of the best crime novels of the year in Ireland 2011 by Irish Times

FIVE STARS
“If you’ve read Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbo or Henning Mankell and want to deepen your experience of the Nordic Noir sub-genre, then Arnaldur Indridason’s books need to be added to your TBR list …
a very poignant, thoughtful and satisfying conclusion. Not just for fans of Nordic Noir, this is a novel all crime fiction lovers will enjoy.”
Crime Fiction Lover, UK

“Black Skies is a superb story of greed, pride and murder from one of Europe’s most successful crime writers.”
Paradise-Mysteries.blogspot.com

“The greatest writer of international police procedurals is without any shadow of doubt the award-winning Arnaldur Indridason. Every time one of his Reykjavik Detective novels is translated into English, no matter how tall the review pile is, an Indriadson novel jumps to the top of the list. … The skill that is so evident in all Indridason’s work, and especially in Black Skies is his ability to tell the tale with a brutal economy of words. The narrative is stripped down to its skeletal base, allowing the reader to become hypnotized when building the imagery that forms in the mind, and one that blends tragedy with humanity. This novel will force you to pause, and contemplate what you have read from time to time, comparing your own life against the protagonists’ misfortunes that peppers Black Skies.

Sigurdur Oli, who has his own marital problems, soon sees beyond the ‘wife swopping’ and extortion, to something far stranger. He sees the dangers of wealth and the carousel that spun faster and faster, and with each turn the riders never knew when to stop, or when enough was enough in their desire for amassing wealth.

The conclusion comes full circle and the tragedy of Anders, the drunken wino who became this way due to a fracture in his childhood made my eyes moisten, as did the tragedy of the bankers caught up in the machinations of greed. There is no finer writer working the literary police-procedural as, the melancholia that is – Black Skies is evidence of that statement.”
Ali Karim, SHOTS (shotsmag.co.uk)