In this series prequel, Erlendur has recently joined the police force as a young officer and immediately sinks into the darkness of Reykjavik's underworld. Working nights, he discovers the city is full of car crashes, robberies, drinkers and fighters. And sometimes an unexplained death. A homeless man Erlendur knows is found drowned, but few people care. A young woman on her way home from a club vanishes. Both cases go cold. Two lost people from two...

"The Shadow Killer is the extraordinary second book in the compelling new series from award-winning Icelandic author Arnaldur Indridason, following The Shadow District. ... A man is found murdered in a small apartment in Reykjavík, shot in the head with a pistol. The police's attention is immediately drawn to the foreign soldiers who are on every street corner in the summer of 1941. So begins officers Flóvent and Thorson's investigation, which will...

Unofficially investigating a suspicious suicide, Inspector Erlendur becomes increasingly unsettled by the unsolved cases of two young people who went missing decades earlier under circumstances tied to his own past.

At the grand Reykjavik hotel, the doorman has been stabbed in the dingy basement he called home. It is only a few days before Christmas and he was preparing to appear as Santa Claus at a children's party. The manager tries to keep the murder under wraps. A glum detective takes up residence in his hotel and an intrusive murder investigation are not what he needs. As Detective Eerlendur queitly surveys the cast of grotesques who populate the hotel,...