Death at the Sanatorium by Ragnar Jónasson is my first ever translated Icelandic read. As you may have guessed from the title, it’s crime fiction – the genre Ragnar Jónasson is known for. Death at the Sanatorium is a stand alone novel, but Ragnar Jónasson has a successful series, Dark Iceland.
Opening sentence: The broken despairing silence was broken.
Sanatoriums do make for great crime fiction / murder mystery settings due to their general air of death and abandonment. I’ve read a few books set in them – The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse springs to mind – and they are the perfect isolated, creepy setting.
In Death at the Sanatorium, we have a cast of characters and timelines, but the two main ones are Helgi (set in 2012), a man doing a crime PHD but having a crisis when it comes to his life and career. In an unhappy marriage, he feels he is being pulled into a job in Iceland he doesn’t want (although it’s pretty good one to be fair).
He was forced to recognise that if his dream of working in the UK wasn’t to be, then this would be the perfect consolation prize – working on complex investigations in Reykjavik CID.
Then in 1983, we have Tinna. A nurse at the sanatorium who actually discovers the death of the title, that of her colleague, Yrsa. She was obviously murdered but the case was never solved, so for his PHD, Helgi is looking into what happened. He discovers one or two things that the police at the time overlooked and the case goes from being cold to very hot indeed…
The Golden Age of Crime Fiction
I really enjoyed all the references to the golden age of crime fiction. Helgi’s father owned a bookshop and passed many books (and a love of reading) onto him. Helgi mentions how reading classic crime fiction has a soothing, calming effect on him and I can totally relate to that. Agatha Christie is definitely one of my go-to comfort read authors.
What distracted me slightly when reading Death at the Sanatorium was that the cadence and rhythm of the read felt a little off. That could be due to the fact it’s translated, or just my personal preference when reading!
Otherwise, I enjoyed the zipping pace and tight story. We were left on a bit of a cliffhanger so can only assume another book following the adventures of Helgi is coming…
I feel I must end this review by sharing my favourite Icelandic reading fact. Jolabokaflod is an amazing tradition where every Christmas Eve, people in Iceland gift each other books so they can spend the day/evening reading together. I love this and have adopted it with my family.
- Get your copy of Death at the Sanatorium here;
- Translated by Victoria Cribb;
- Published by Penguin August 2024;
- 276 pages;
- My rating:
Books on the 7:47 