THE QUIET MOTHER

A detective’s connection to a brutal murder triggers soul-searching and painful memories.

In a crowded block of Reykjavík apartments, no one notices when a woman is murdered by a shadowy figure. Called in to examine the scene, Marta, chief inspector of the Reykjavík CID, finds the phone number of retired detective Konrád on the victim’s desk. Konrád and the woman, Valborg, had recently had a fateful meeting at a museum, where she implored him for help in finding the son she’d given up for adoption decades earlier. Immersed in investigating the unsolved murder of his father, Konrád had never followed up. Now, in light of Valborg’s death, he feels compelled to find her child and deliver her a kind of justice. Several threads are woven into the plot of Konrád’s third case. Flashbacks take the reader through Valborg’s sad story, while Konrád is overwhelmed with memories of his strict father and difficult childhood. Marta questions Valborg’s neighbors, each with their own subplot. Multiple stories of abuse and loss add texture to the crime at the heart of the story. In the hands of this award-winning master of Icelandic Noir, the thematic link in this tapestry is the haunting of the present by the past. In the course of his probe, Konrád is reunited with his childhood friend Eygló, a colorful psychic investigator who held séances with her father and took a pivotal role in The Girl by the Bridge (2023).

A complex, compassionate mystery with mesmerizing paranormal trappings.