death at the sanatorium

Fresh off of Reykjavik, his career-changing standalone co-written with the Icelandic prime minister, #1 Icelandic bestseller Jonasson presents a riveting new thriller.

1983

At a former sanatorium in the north of Iceland, now a hospital ward, an old nurse, Yrsa, is found murdered. Detective Hulda Hermannsdottir and her boss, Sverrir, are sent to investigate her death. There, they discover five suspects: the chief physician, two junior nurses, a young doctor, and the caretaker, who is arrested following false testimony from one of the nurses, but subsequently released.

Less than a week after the murder, the chief physician, is also found dead, having apparently fallen from a balcony. Sverrir, rules his death as suicide and assumes that he was guilty of the murder as well. The case is closed.

2012

Almost thirty years later, Helgi Reykdal, a young police officer, has been studying criminology in the UK, but decides to return to Iceland when he is offered a job at the Reykjavik police department--the job which detective Hulda Hermannsdottir is about to retire from.

He is also a collector of golden age detective stories, and is writing his thesis on the 1983 murders in the north. As Helgi delves deeper into the past, and starts his new job, he decides to try to meet with the original suspects. But soon he finds silence and suspicion at every turn, as he tries to finally solve the mystery from years before.

RAGNAR JONASSON (he/him) is an international award winning author, with over four million books sold in 36 territories. His books have been number one bestsellers in Germany, where he had three books on the top ten of the Spiegel bestseller list at the same time, as well as on Amazon Kindle in the UK, Canada and Australia. His books are frequent number one crime fiction bestsellers in France, and in 2021 he became the first Icelandic author to enter the Sunday Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. His series, the Dark Iceland series, and the Hulda series, are being developed for television by CBS Studios/Stampede and Warner Bros. respectively.