Far North

June 25, 2012
The 2008 financial meltdown sets the backdrop for Ridpath’s impressive second crime thriller featuring Magnus Jonson, a Boston police detective who moved from Iceland with his father to the U.S. at age 12 and has been recently seconded to the Icelandic police force (after 2011’s Where the Shadows Lie). After participating in a protest in 2009 as part of the so-called pots-and-pans revolution, unemployed banker Harpa Einarsdóttir accidentally kills her former boss, Gabríel Örn. Eight months later, another leading figure in Icelandic banking, Óskar Gunnarsson, who was suspected of fraud, is shot to death during a visit to London. Magnus, assigned to the second case, soon wonders about a link between the two deaths. Meanwhile, he remains haunted by the unsolved murder of his father, Ragnar, stabbed in the back in Duxbury, Mass., when Magnus was 20. The significance of the flashback sequences beginning in 1934 isn’t immediately clear, but Ridpath skillfully weaves them into the story. Agent: Oliver Munson, Blake Friedmann Literary Agency.

August 1, 2012
Detective Sgt. Magnus Jonson, seconded from Boston to Reykjavik, tackles two cases, one with global consequences, the other striking considerably closer to home. In the wake of the calamitous financial meltdown that's paralyzed Iceland, oskar Gunnarsson, ex-chairman of the odinsbanki, has taken himself off to London, but that's not far enough for whomever shoots him to death. The Metropolitan Police are far from certain that his killer was Icelandic, but they send DS Sharon Piper from Kensington to Reykjavik to liaise with local law enforcement just in case. Magnus is only too eager to work the case even before Inspector Baldur Jakobsson, head of the Violent Crimes Unit, hands it to him. He wastes no time in connecting Gunnarsson's murder to the suspicious suicide several months earlier of odinsbanki manager Gabriel orn Bergsson. And rightly so, since author Ridpath has already shown Bergsson being killed by his subordinate and lover Harpa Einarsdottir, whose anger that he swindled her and her father out of their life savings and then threw her under the bus was whipped into a fury by an unlikely crew of agitators: aging punk rocker Sindri Palsson, fisherman Bjorn Helgason, London School of Economics student isak Samuelsson and laid-off chef Frikki Eiriksson. Whoever pulled the trigger on Gunnarsson, Magnus realizes, has more targets in mind. But despite the Boston cop's instincts, he's seriously distracted from the case by disturbing new information about a long-simmering family feud that involves his own Icelandic relatives. Which case will claim his deepest loyalty? As in Where the Shadows Lie (2011), Magnus doesn't shine as a detective, and his fish-out-of-water act could just as easily have played out back home in Boston. Even so, his second case is bound to hook readers who wonder about either the fictional or the real-life implications of the Icelandic financial crisis.

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August 1, 2012
A distant, chill crime story, set appropriately in Iceland. The time is just a couple of years ago. The citizens are, like most everybody, struggling to deal with the profound screwing they've taken from bankers. A ragtag band of protesters calls out a moneyman; when he appears, the roughing-up gets out of hand. The cover-up begins; it's the protesters' ill luck that the cop assigned to the case is Magnus Johnson, a local fellow just back from a stint with the Boston police. He senses the killing isn't over; rather, this is the beginning of a Day of the Jackal conspiracy. His inquiry, like the narration, is either thoughtful or ponderously slow, depending upon the reader. There is too much backstory: the mystery of his father's murder will probably provide a sequel, but right now, who cares? The story warmsand speedsup in the final chase. The killer is revealed, his identity both shocking and perfectly reasonable. Murder, even mass murder, seems for a few pages the only possible relief for intolerable pain.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)