Operation Napoleon

August 1, 2011
Near the outset of this kinetic thriller from Indridason (Jar City), Kristín, a lawyer with the Iceland Foreign Ministry in Reykjavík, receives a phone call from her younger brother, Elías, who tells her he's part of a team on its way to the remote Vatnajökull glacier. Almost immediately, Kristín finds herself being pursued by assassins tied to a covert American military operation to retrieve the wreckage of a German plane that crashed on the glacier in the closing days of WWII with, oddly, German and U.S. servicemen aboard. Dismissing official disinformation about the mission's purpose, Kristín flings herself into the thick of a black ops caper to uncover a secret so unsavory that the American military would kill to keep it quiet. Indridason takes an invigoratingly fresh approach to one of the best known conspiracy theories about Nazi and American relations. The cliché-riddled translation won't stop readers from racing to learn the final secret.