Snowblind

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Snowblind – a masterclass in scene setting and subtle tension building ... Where Agatha Christie created a murder mystery with a small suspect pool on a fast moving train or within a large country house, Ragnar Jónasson creates the same feel in a whole town’ Grab This Book The murder-in-a-small-town theme plays out a bit like an Agatha Christie novel ...a satisfying mystery where all the pieces, in the end, fall together.' DALLAS NEWS His series of novels are set in Siglufjörur, the northernmost town in Iceland, which was home to his father and his grandparents. He would visit his parents and grandparents in the town and still makes time to go to Siglufjörur every year. He comes from a long line of authors as his grandfather was also a nonfiction author that penned the history of his hometown. The small New England town of Coventry had weathered a thousand blizzards…but never one like this. Icy figures danced in the wind and gazed through children’s windows with soul-chilling eyes. People wandered into the whiteout and were never seen again. Families were torn apart, and the town would never be the same.

At the age of 24, Ari Thor Arason finds himself recruited, as a young policeman into a town where his boss, the chief, (Tomas) tells him "nothing ever happens." Selected as one of the debuts of the year (Crime Fiction Lover) and one of the books of the year by Bolo Books, Off the Shelf Books, Reading Room with a View, Crime Thriller Girl, Steph's Book Blog and, Grab This Book, and as one of the series of the year by Bibliophile Book Club. Ari Thor the rookie policeman is still having issues dealing with the locals as the tension that emerged in the first novel still persists. The peace of Siglufjörour is suddenly shattered when Ari’s colleague is shot at point blank range in an out of the way house. Snowblind: A brief career in the cocaine trade written by American author Robert Sabbag in 1976 is a non-fiction [ citation needed] account about a character named Zachary Swan who turned his hand to smuggling cocaine from Colombia into the US. Set in the 1970s before organised crime took over the cocaine trade, it is based primarily in New York City and Bogotá and features a variety of colourful characters. Unlike other smugglers at the time Swan concocted a vast array of scams designed both to evade customs officials and protect his 'employees' from prosecution, all of which are highly imaginative and entertaining. Enter Snowblind, which features snow wraiths that ride the blizzard wind and drag people to their icy deaths. Hell yeah!The sun was on the horizon and all seven were bobbing in the surf when in the distance an intruder appeared. A jogger. He approached, moving at an even pace along the waterline, his face flushed, his breathing steady, his body drenched with sweat and glory, radiating that all-American, infinite faith in the cardiovascular benefits of discomfort." Ragnar Jónasson is a new name in the crime writing genre and I urge anyone who is a fan of Nordic crime noir to rush out and get yourself a copy of Snowblind this you will want to add to your collection. It is really that good ... a tense, gripping novel’ The Last Word Jonasson spins an involving tale of small town police work that vividly captures the snowy setting that so affects the rookie cop. Iceland noir at its moodiest." - Booklist

The lead character of the Dark Iceland series is Ari Thor, a twenty-something year old rookie detective that has just been posted to the town of Siglufjörour. Siglufjörour is a small town on the mountains near the Arctic Circle where everyone knows everyone. Isolated and only accessible through a dark tunnel bored into the mountain, it makes for a great setting for noir crime novel series. ESCHBORNER STADTMAGAZIN / “A wonderful work to get to know the guest country of the bookfair, Iceland.” – Eschborner Stadtmagazin on SNOWBLIND This is subtle..Christopher Golden proves here that the best creepy stories do not need out and out gore blood and guts, the best ones are the ones where its the atmosphere that gets you, and where the characters are realistic people that you can root for even as unrealistic things are happening to them. It did genuinely make me shiver now and then (creepy, misbehaving children will do that to me every time!) and it is an imaginative and disturbing tale. GALA Magazine‘s best novels of the autumn 2011: 1. Ein altes Haus am Hudson Rlver - Edith Wharton, 2. Alchemie der Nacht - Heike Koschyk, 3. Leichte Turbulenzen - Alexa Hennig von Lange, 4. Schneebraut – Ragnar Jonasson [SNOWBLIND], 5. Die Liebeshandlung - Jeffrey Eugenides, 6. IQ 84 - Haruki Murakami.

Ari Thor the lead character in the novels lost his parents when he was very young and had to fend for himself for much of his teenage and adult life. As such, he finds it hard to build any meaningful relationships with colleagues though he has the intelligence and a keen sense of justice that makes him very effective at his job.

I have definitely found a new favorite Author and series. In the vein of Agatha Christie, which this Author has translated 14 works into Icelandic for comes tales of mystery and murder set in the most unlikely of places, Siglufordur, an isolated fishing village on the Northern coast of Iceland. Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. Snowblind is a beautifully written thriller, as tense as it is terrifying – Jónasson is a writer with a big future’ Luca Veste Yes, I read this during the heat of summer. If I’d read this during our horrendous and never-ending winter I most likely would’ve moved to one of those sunshiny states. This book gets points for its descriptions of an icy cold hell but, most to my dismay because I was truly looking forward to it, it never moved above a 3 star read for me. I’ll try to tell you why.Mr. Golden does a good job of not letting the story stall but I did have to suspend belief at several points in the book. It's scary but then there is that but. Starred Review. Jónasson skillfully alternates points of view and shifts of time that set in relief Ari Thór's efforts to find a purpose to his lonely life. The action builds to a shattering climax." - Publishers Weekly If I were writing a story that involved cocaine smuggling in the 1970s, this book would be the perfect textbook: it's that detailed. How to design a smuggling operation, how to scale and implement it, how to weigh, evaluate, cut and resell cocaine, it is all covered in this book. He lives in Reykjavik though he gives lectures in many crime fiction writing panels across the world, and publishes for renowned magazines such as “Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine”. Ragnar got interested in a literary career from a very young age when he translated fourteen of Agatha Christie’s novels into his native Icelandic by the time he was seventeen. FRÉTTABLAÐIÐ, ICELAND / “A well constructed, well stylized and exciting mystery with good characterization and a solution which is a complete surprise to the reader.” - Friðrika Benónýsdóttir, Fréttablaðið newspaper review on SNOWBLIND

The party went out of control somewhere in the early hours before dawn, and the steps he had taken in the beginning to minimize his losses were eventually undermined by the immutable laws of chemistry - his mind, simply, had turned to soup. He was up against the law of averages with a head full of coke. The smart money pulled out, and the odds mounted steadily. By sunrise, Swan was beaten by the spread." Ragnar Jónasson writes with a chilling, poetic beauty – a must- read addition to the growing canon of Iceland Noir’ Peter JamesIt may be my fault for listening to this as an audiobook. I don’t know. People seem to love this book but for me I felt like I was playing a frustrating game of “Who was that again?” throughout most of the novel and I lost interest in the story and the characters as a result. WDR 5 - SCALA / „Bloody yet quiet portrait of a snowed-in Icelandic sea village, homely and gloomy at the same time.“ – Ingrid Müller-Münch, WDR 5 Scala, 22.11.2011 on SNOWBLIND