Death at the Sanatorium

After having read one of Ragnar Jonasson's early entries in his "Dark Iceland" series (Snowblind), I decided to read his newest book, also set in Iceland but in Reykjavik rather than the far north of the country. 

Kirkus offers this review: "The retro title introduces a valentine to Golden Age whodunits relocated to Iceland. Helgi Reykdal, a graduate student in criminology at an English university, has returned to Iceland. Last summer he interned with Reykjavík’s criminal investigation department, and there’s a job waiting for him there if he wants it. But he’s torn by his conflicting desires to return to the U.K. and to appease Bergthóra, the ...live-in girlfriend who wants him to stay. An additional inducement arrives with the possibility of writing his dissertation on the deaths a generation ago of a nurse and doctor at a sanitorium in the provincial northern town of Akureyri. When both Tinna Einarsdóttir, the nurse who discovered both bodies, and Sverrir Eggertsson, the police investigator who allegedly solved the case back in 1983 by arresting what even he came to admit was the wrong suspect, summarily refuse to talk to him, his interest is naturally piqued. The circle of possible killers is tiny—Tinna herself, along with her colleague Elísabet, ambitious Dr. Thorri Thorsteinsson, and Broddi the caretaker—and in the course of Helgi’s investigation, one of them obligingly narrows it even further by killing one of the others. Inspired by his reading of classic mysteries with similar settings... Helgi digs into the archives and questions the people who are willing to talk to him. The story, which toggles back and forth between 1983 and 2012, generates considerable suspense from a remarkably limited cast of characters living and dead. Clever, absorbing, and no more uplifting than you’d expect from this master of Icelandic noir." 

Publishers Weekly opens their review with "Jónasson follows up Reykjavik with a meticulously plotted whodunit worthy of Agatha Christie..." and concludes "With scrupulously fair-play plotting, Helgi’s tumultuous relationship with his live-in girlfriend as an emotional anchor, and a worthy payoff, this is another winner from Jónasson. Readers will be rapt."