I've read a few Scandinavian crime books by an author who has won the Nordic Crime Novel Prize two years running as well as the CWA Gold Dagger Award for the top crime novel of the year. Arnaldur Indridason depicts a bleak life in modern Iceland, full of cold, dark and ice. Crime occurs just like anywhere, and while much of it may be caused by winter-induced drunkenness, murders are usually personal.

THE SHADOW DISTRICT begins when an elderly man is found dead in his bed, not entirely surprising. The case isn't treated as suspicious but a routine autopsy of Stefan Thordarson uncovers something odd. The man had been killed. This case does not go to police inspector Erlendur, the central figure in many previous books, but a female officer called Marta who discusses it with her retired detective pal Konrad. Checking the old man's belongings uncovers old newspaper clippings about Rosamunda, a young woman who was found murdered during WW2, when British soldiers and American GIs had been stationed in Iceland.

We return to Reykjavik in 1944 when Ingiborg, a young woman whose parents have forbidden her to fraternise with soldiers, stumbles upon the murdered woman behind the National Theatre. But she is there with her GI boyfriend, and they leave, hoping nobody has seen them. Everyone knows everyone, however, and soon the military police call to her door. Thus we get an insight into investigations of the past, with a local detective co-operating with an Icelandic- descended Canadian MP, trying to avoid red tape.

The contemporary murder reawakens the cold case, but are the deaths in fact connected? Investigations by Konrad allow us a glimpse into Icelandic life, with a breakfast consisting of porridge, liver sausage and rye bread. We also learn about the folk tales told by the farming people; a student calls them a mirror of society. Relationships were strained with the influx of foreign servicemen, some of whom took advantage of women; other women found new work and prospered. And THE SHADOW DISTRICT was largely residential, some of it good, some slums, with the Theatre at one end and the meat packing district at the other. This is a good allusion to respectability declining unseen behind a frontage. Arnaldur Indridason has woven a masterly web of lies, tragedies and societal change in his latest work; Iceland has seldom seemed so close to home.