This is somewhat surprising, given that The Flatey Enigma is steeped in Icelandic sagas. But none of them is a hero, and the book turns out to be about virtual and shifting communities instead of heroic actions. A couple of other cops go from Reykjavík to Flatey to investigate Bryngeir's death.
A Reykjavík police detective named Dagbjartur gets some time onstage as he pieces together elements of Gaston Lund's travels in the Icelandic capital. Kjartan is our focal character, of sorts, but The Flatey Enigma really lacks a center. This revelation puts Kjartan on a course toward reconciliation with Jóhanna, the Flatey physician who had been engaged to the long-dead clubman. But Kjartan now learns that he was innocent. Kjartan is an ex-con: he'd done several years in prison for manslaughter in the death of a fellow clubmember during a recreation of a Viking ritual.
Kjartan, a young local magistrate, comes to Flatey to look into Lund's death. One long-buried killing comes to light as the recent deaths are investigated. In other words, The Flatey Enigma is a murder mystery without a murder. After which, a delusional deacon had committed the atrocities on Bryngeir's body, but long after the reporter would have been able to perceive them. Meaty stuff for any Krimi fan, but come to find in the end that Gaston Lund had simply been forgotten on the island by an Alzheimer-suffering boatman, and Bryngeir had fallen into a well accidentally. The reporter soon finds himself knocked on the head, drowned, and ritually disarticulated. The second (and final) corpse is that of a nosy reporter named Bryngeir who has come to the island of Flatey to look into Lund's death. The professor had died of exposure, and the island is so remote that somebody must have left him there to die. The first corpse to be found (in the year 1960) is that of Danish philologist Gaston Lund, wasted away to bones on the island of Ketilsey, in the west fjords of Iceland. However (spoilers ahead!), these investigations turn out to unearth no murders at all. And The Flatey Enigma does follow a police investigation, with legwork and forensics and the interactions of an ad hoc team of detectives.
Still, Viktor Arnar's work shares themes with novels by Arnaldur Indriðason and Ragnar Jónasson. But Viktor Arnar's book is only obliquely a detective-inspector novel – only partially a police procedural at all. I read The Flatey Enigma by Viktor Arnar Ingólfsson last fall, for my website cid, on detective-inspector novels. Lection home authors titles dates links about
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