You don't actually have to be from Scandinavia to write a Nordic thriller these days. French author Johana Gustawsson (albeit married to a Swede) with her courageous BLOCK 46 (still not available in English, sadly), Michael Ridpath and Iceland-based Brit Quentin Bates are as capable of evoking the icey wastes of the far north and attendant crimes of a somewhat cold nature. The 5th Officer Gunnhildur Gisladottir mystery sees our doughty female cop juggling with parallel cases when two junior league drug thieves from Reykvavik are snowed in inside a mothballed hotel in the wilderness holding two female hostages, alongside the disappearance of a mother and daughter on a shopping trip and a suspicious house fire. Patiently, she pieces the elements together as a race against time develops. A likeable heroine with just the right touch of fierceness and probity tempered with self-doubt and humanity, in a landscape with no compare make for a thrill a minute.
Snowed in with a couple of psychopaths for the winter...When two small-time crooks rob Reykjavik's premier drugs dealer, hoping for a quick escape to the sun, their plans start to unravel after their getaway driver fails to show. Tensions mount between the pair and the two women they have grabbed as hostages when they find themselves holed upcountry in an isolated hotel that has been mothballed for the season. Back in the capital, Gunnhildur, Eirikur and Helgi find themselves at a dead end investigating what appear to be the unrelated disappearance of a mother, her daughter and their car during a day's shopping, and the death of a thief in a house fire. Gunna and her team are faced with a set of riddles but as more people are quizzed it begins to emerge that all these unrelated incidents are in fact linked. And at the same time, two increasingly desperate lowlifes have no choice but to make some big decisions on how to get rid of their accidental hostages...
Brought up in the south of England, Quentin Bates took up the offer of a gap year working in Iceland in 1979, and found himself spending a gap decade there. During the 1980s he acquired a family, a new language and a new profession, before returning to the UK in 1990. Since then he has been, among other things, a full-time marine journalist.
Frozen Out is born of the author's intimate knowledge of Iceland and its people, along with a fascination with the recent upheaval in Iceland's turbulent society. Quentin and his wife regularly return to their friends, relatives and other home in the north of Iceland.
