Ragnar Jónasson's outstanding The Mysterious Case of the Missing Crime Writer opens with Icelandic police detective Helgi Reykdal in his "happy place": reading a beloved mystery novel in the quiet comfort of his family's bookstore, far from his job in Reykjavík.
Helgi's vacation is cut short when Elín Jónsdóttir, an author "hailed as a pioneer of Icelandic crime writing," goes missing. Her publisher is worried, and Helgi's boss wants him on the investigation before it becomes public, believing the detective's fondness for mysteries gives him an advantage. Helgi rereads Elín's novels in search of clues, and he interviews Elín's friends and associates, yielding a complicated decades-old history. Helgi can't help comparing Elín's vanishing with Agatha Christie's still-unexplained 11-day disappearance in 1926. Furthermore, Helgi's personal life threatens to intrude on his case. He is considering a future with his new girlfriend, the intelligent Aníta, but his violent, abusive, alcoholic former girlfriend, Bergthóra, refuses to believe their relationship is over and she begins stalking Aníta.
Jónasson expertly sprinkles The Mysterious Case of the Missing Crime Writer with scenes from other time frames, including a 1965 conversation about robbing a bank, a 2002 flashback about Elín's last novel, and a 2005 interview with the author. They provide a savvy homage to detective fiction and cleverly drop clues worthy of the best of that fiction. Helgi's own love of the genre, long a source of amusement among his colleagues, provides amusing nods to the reader as well.
Jónasson's adroit follow-up to Death at the Sanatorium cleverly mixes a solid police procedural with a valentine to 1930s and '40s mysteries. --Oline H. Cogdill, freelance reviewer