THE DARKNESS KNOWS (2021)
By Arnaldur Indridason
Minotaur Books/St. Martin’s Press, 352 pages.
★★★★
Arnaldur Indridason is one of Iceland’s top crime fiction writers, and his newest novel, The Darkness Knows demonstrates why. Some readers might know his protagonist, Konrád, from Indridason’s The Shadow District (2017).
Konrád is retired, but he has trouble staying that way. To say that Konrád has issues is an understatement. Before his criminal father was murdered in an unsolved case, he sometimes used young Konrád as a foil in his schemes. With a background such as that, Konrád wasn’t always trusted by his colleagues when he became a cop and, given that he has a withered arm, he wasn’t exactly the usual physical candidate either. Konrád quit the force to care for his wife Erne, who died of cancer, but he’s still haunted from having cheated on her when she was ill. He also has a terse relationship with son Húgo, who is a cold fish, and is married to a woman Konrád finds overbearing, though he loves his twin grandkids. The latter are pretty much his sole joy.
To further complicate matters, a cold case–the disappearance of a man named Sigurvin in 1985–heats up when, courtesy of global warming, Sigurvin’s preserved body emerges from the melt on Langjökull glacier. This is especially unsettling as Konrád was part of the team that arrested Hjaltalín for Sigurvin’s murder 30 years earlier, though without a corpse, they couldn’t make the charges stick. Now Hjaltalín is back in jail and insists on speaking with Konrád. All the evidence then and now points to Hjaltalín, and though and he and Konrád don’t particularly like each other, Hjaltalín trusts him more than any other cop. Hjaltalín is dying from throat cancer, but he’s confessing to nothing. He wants Konrád to promise he will clear his name, though Konrád refuses as he’s sure the right man is in jail.
That last point is a Chekhov’s gun, of course. Against his better judgment, Konrád is sucked back into a case he wishes had stayed frozen. So how does a guy who has been off the force for six years even have the authority to investigate? He doesn’t, actually, though he calls upon a few favors. Even those are fraught: the pathologist with whom he had his affair, Reykjavik chief inspector Marta who puts him on a short leash, and several surly lower-level functionaries. Major obstacles remain. The lead investigator in 1985 despises Konrád and others on the force find him a nuisance. Plus, he’s an ex-cop so anyone who wishes to can simply slam the door on him and proceed to do exactly that. All the signs say that Konrád should walk away and if that’s not another Chekhov’s gun, old Anton was from Iowa.
Of course, Konrád doesn’t slink away, or this would be a 25-page novel. Things get messier when Konrád encounters a woman named Herdís who wants him to look into her brother Villi’s hit-and-run death in 2009. Herdís remembers that Villi met a man on the night Sigurvin disappeared and thinks something untoward occurred. If that’s not labyrinthine enough for you, Konrád imagines that perhaps his father’s murder in 1963 somehow connects to all of this. You might wonder how three killings spread over 46 can possibly be part of a pattern. Maybe they’re not. One of the intriguing things about the novel is that Konrád is the opposite pole from preternaturally prescient investigators. A big part of him still thinks that Hjaltalín is a guilty as an Icelandic summer is long. But it boils down a question of how he can possibly stay retired with three mysteries lying on the table like crack awaiting an addict’s nose.
By now you probably realize that Indridson favors complexity and damaged psyches over cookie cutter potboilers. Before The Darkness Knows wraps, it takes us many places. Hjaltalín’s dying refusal to provide an alibi for his whereabouts on the evening that Sigurvin was dumped into his glacial grave is evocative of the trial of the American labor troubadour Joe Hill. Indridson also steers us into fake spiritualism, seedy bars, the Boy Scouts, suicide, infidelity, and the Icelandic financial crash (2008-10). On that journey, Konrád encounters a gaggle of characters that range from the down-and-out and remorseful to the ominous and amoral. Like readers, Konrád is never sure what’s a real clue and what’s a red herring.
The Darkness Knows does employ several Chekhov’s guns that fire blanks. It stretches credulity that the mere discovery of Sigurvin’s body triggers memories that they did not 30 years earlier and with implausible vividness. As much as I appreciated the complexity of Indridson’s plotting, there is also a palpable sense that snipping several threads would have made for a tidier book. But I’ll take an intelligent mystery over one stuffed with clichés any day of the week.
Rob Weir
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