OBOC - Iceland

The very fact that I finished "Silence of the grave" in one day is enough evidence to show that Arnaldur Indridason has a winner here; and sure enough the book has won many crime fiction awards and the author is compared to many of his Scandinavian counterparts.

A skeleton is accidentally discovered outside the city which brings Erlendur Sveinsson to the case who concludes that the body must've been buried for quite some time. Erlendur like so many other leading fictional detectives is a lone wolf,  completely lacking in charm whose personal life in shambles. In this novel he is forced to confront his own past as he sits besides his junkie daughter  Eva Lind who is in a coma after losing a child, while at the same time unraveling the secrets of two other families each with their own tragic history as revealed by the grave.  We also get a glimpse of the changing face of Reykjavik from the time of the second world war.

The story is told in two alternate narrations - one in the present as Erlendur and his team track down available leads; the other is the sometimes hard to read story of the lady in green, a sad saga of soul destroying domestic violence and the effect it has on the family (some of the most well written passages in the book).

While i enjoyed the book, I have to complain about predictability. There were very few surprises or twists. Although I don't like trick endings, it seemed like this was a bit too easy to solve as the red herring was easy to spot. Even Erlendur's characterization is typical of so many of the detectives from the cold :) Makes you wonder what's with the weather that produces these types of detectives and an army of crime writers! Despite the predictability in the way the mystery is solved, the book stands out because of the author's ability to tell the story of the ordinary yet outstanding Icelandic mother surviving against all odds under some extremely difficult circumstances and the amazing backstory which makes this cold case come to life.