Showing results by author "Philip Roughton" in All Categories

A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland's most beloved novelists. A man comes to awareness in a cold church in the Icelandic countryside, not knowing who he is, why he's there, or how he arrived, with a stranger staring mockingly from a few pews back. Startled by the man's cryptic questions, he leaves—and plunges into a history spanning centuries, a past pressed into his genes that sinks him closer to some knowledge of himself.

Bodies are discovered in one of the excavated houses at a volcanic tourist attraction dubbed 'The Pompeii of the North'. Markus Magnusson, who was only a teenager when the volcano erupted, falls under suspicion and hires attorney Thora Gudmundsdottir to defend him—but when his childhood sweetheart is murdered, his case starts to look more difficult, and the locals seem oddly reluctant to back him up.

When all contact is lost with two Icelanders working in a harsh and sparsely populated area on the northeast coast of Greenland, Thora is hired to investigate. Is there any connection with the woman who vanished from the site some months earlier? Why are the locals so hostile? And could one of the team staying at the site with Thora be responsible for the disappearances?

Growing up on a farm in early twentieth-century rural Iceland, Karitas Ólafsdóttir, one of six siblings, yearns for a new life. An artist, Karitas has a powerful calling and is determined to never let go of her true being, one unsuited for the conventional. But she is powerless against the fateful turns of real life and all its expectations of women. Pulled back time and again by design and by chance to the Icelandic countryside - as dutiful daughter, loving mother, and fisherman’s wife - she struggles to thrive, to be what she was meant to be.

Keflavik: a town that has been called the darkest place in Iceland, surrounded by black lava fields, hemmed in by a sea that may not be fished. Its livelihood depends entirely on a US military base, a conduit for American influences that shaped Icelandic culture and ethics from the 1950s to the dawning of the new millennium. It is to Keflavik that Ari - a writer and publisher - returns from Copenhagen at the behest of his dying father, two years after walking out on his wife and children.

A young man with Down's syndrome has been convicted of burning down his care home and killing five people, but a fellow inmate at his secure psychiatric unit has hired Thora to prove Jakob is innocent. If he didn't do it, who did? And how is the multiple murder connected to the death of Magga, killed in a hit and run on her way to babysit?

A must-listen for fans of police procedurals and international crime from Stefán Máni's Grimsson series.

Detective H. Grímsson is intelligent, hard as nails, and very resourceful. But he's also his own worst enemy. After an unfortunate shooting incident in Iceland's largest shopping mall on Christmas Eve, he's demoted to a police deputy in a small rural village in eastern Iceland. Grímsson's plan is to kick back, drink some beer, and enjoy this time away from home. When two young female hitchhikers disappear, Grímsson fears that the girls are lost in the highlands or have drowned in the glacial river. But then one of the girls wanders naked into the village and dies in Grimsson's arms.

A member of the parliament is stabbed to death in Reykjavik, the small and usually peaceful capital of Iceland. Police officer Grímsson thinks he saw the perpetrator earlier that night, in a pub in the city's east end. The young man turns himself in. He has no previous record and does not remember anything about the night of the murder, but his fingerprints are on the murder weapon. Grímsson feels that the young man is somehow innocent, a victim rather than a wrongdoer.

Detective H. Grímsson is a city detective, and a damn good one at that, owing much to what he calls his uncanny intuition. However, that's only half the truth of it—detective Grímsson is clairvoyant and frequently sees the grim shadow of death before it approaches. A young college student is found dead in his BMW on a gravel road not far from the city. He was shot at close range. Grímsson suspects that this has something to do with the nudes that the deceased had in his possession.

Single mother Harpa has always been a misfit. Her physical description is like no other Icelander: so small she self-deprecatingly refers to herself as a dwarf, so dark-skinned she doubts her genetic link to her parents, so strange she nearly believed the children who mistook her for a mythical creature of the forest. Even as an adult, she struggles to make sense of her place in the world. When she sees how her teenage daughter, Edda, has suffered since a friend’s drug overdose, Harpa has no choice but to tear her away from her friends.