A man discovers there was an unwelcome guest in his apartment; not wanting to worry his live-in girlfriend, who is mired in a custody battle with her ex, he keeps this from her. Another man, the recovering-addict son of a retired politician, dies in what may be a deliberate hit-and-run. A teacher asks cop Ari Thór Arason, who works in northern Iceland's sleepy Siglufjördur, to look into the 1957 death of his aunt, which was written off as an accidental self-poisoning. The teacher believes that finding out the truth hinges on learning the identity of a mysterious young man in an old family photo. Meanwhile, Ari Thór strikes up a reciprocal working relationship with Ísrún, an award-winning TV journalist from Reykjavík who is covering the deadly flu that has put Siglufjördur into quarantine.
While these swirling plotlines may seem disparate, fans of the Ari Thór series, which began with Snowblind, know that they can depend on Ragnar Jónasson to tie everything up in a beautiful Agatha Christie-esque bow. Ari Thór is no Hercule Poirot--he'd be the first to admit that he lacks even a scintilla of the Belgian detective's social graces--but Rupture concludes with a delectable, almost campily drawn-out Poirotian summarization. Although it's not at all necessary to have read any of the three previous books in the series to appreciate Rupture, some foreknowledge of Ísrún's medical history and of Ari Thór's rocky romantic past with Kristín makes the emotional stakes that much higher this go-round. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer