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.

Feeling unfulfilled in his career after attending a school reunion, Sigurdur Oĺi struggles with setbacks in his relationship and position in the Icelandic police department only to have a favor for a friend go wrong, catapulting him into the middle of agrisly murder case.

When a skeleton is unearthed at a Reykjavik building site, Inspector Erlendur and his colleagues set out to unravel a complex decades-old crime that may have ties to his own troubled family history.

"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 lead them down a path darker than either of them expected, and force them to reckon with their own demons"--

On an icy January day, the Reykjavik police are called to a block of flats where a body has been found in the garden: a young, dark-skinned boy, frozen to the ground in a pool of his own blood. The discovery of a stab wound in his stomach extinguishes any hope that this was a tragic accident. Erlendur and his team embark on their investigation with little to go on but the news that the boy's Thai half-brother is missing. Is he implicated, or simply...

"An elderly couple are worried about their granddaughter. They know she's been smuggling drugs, and now she's gone missing. Looking for help, they turn to Konrad, a former policeman whose reputation precedes him. Always absent-minded, he constantly ruminates on the fate of his father, who was stabbed to death decades ago. But digging into the past reveals much more than anyone set out to discover, and a little girl who drowned in the Reykjavik city...

"Two crimes linked across decades. A murderer still at work in the deadly shadows. THE PAST: In wartime Reykjavik, Iceland, a young woman is found strangled in "the Shadow District," a rough and dangerous area of the city. An Icelandic detective and a member of the American military police are on the trail of a brutal killer. THE PRESENT: A ninety-year-old man is discovered dead on his bed, smothered with his own pillow. Konrad, a former detective...

"Retired detective Konrad returns to a haunting cold case in The Darkness Knows by Arnaldur Indridason, the "undisputed King of the Icelandic thriller." -The Guardian (UK) A frozen body is discovered in the icy depths of Langjökull glacier, apparently that of a businessman who disappeared thirty years before. At the time, an extensive search and police investigation yielded no results-one of the missing man's business associates was briefly held...