First look: Nightblind by Ragnar Jonasson

No sooner have we included Ragnar Jonasson’s novel Snowblind in our top five debuts of 2015, than its sequel has arrived. Nightblind is already available for Kindle, and comes out as a paperback on 15 January. Take a nice long look at this pocket-sized paperback with a moody long exposure shot of car tail lights heading towards an ominous mountain on its cover.

Why an ominous mountain? Because like Snowblind the sequel is set in Siglufordur, Iceland’s northern most community, accessible only via a tunnel that goes under said mountain. Helpfully, the publisher has included a map of Iceland indicating the town’s location in the front of the book, which you can see below.

It’s in this tight-knit community that Ari Thor Arason is the local police detective and this time he’s got to solve the case of a policeman who’s been shot at point blank range in the middle of the night… in a deserted house. Ragnar Jonasson is known for his Agatha Christie-style plotting and this mystery links together local politics, an insane asylum in Reykjavik, and a mysterious young woman who is new to the area.

The translation has been done by fellow novelist Quentin Bates, and at 210 pages this bijou read is available now on Amazon for Kindle, with the paperback weighing in at £8.99 when it arrives. Click here to purchase.

The events in Nightblind take place five years after Snowblind. The next in the series will be Blackout, due late 2016, which jumps back in time again to where Snowblind concluded.