The Girl in the Ice by Lotte and Søren Hammer / Reviewed by Kelly Saderholm
Killer Nashville Book of the Day
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Søren and Lotte Hammer
The Girl in the Ice by Lotte and Søren Hammer
Reviewed by Kelly Saderholm
There is a Christmastime tradition in Iceland called the Jólabókaflóð, or “Christmas book flood”, in which people buy each other books, and on Christmas Eve, after eating a delicious dinner, Icelanders crawl into bed and read their new books. Absolutely my kind of holiday. Although The Girl in the Ice was written by the Danish (not Icelandic) sister and brother team of Lotte and Søren Hammer, it's an excellent candidate for an all-night read, because once you pick it up, it is difficult to put down.
The Girl in the Ice begins with the grim discovery of a body spotted on an ice cap in Greenland by a helicopter pilot. Detective Chief Superintendent Konrad Simonsen is flown in to investigate. He quickly realizes he has seen a similar scene, and deduces that this killer has struck before. The hunt for the killer takes us back to Denmark, and through many twists and turns in the story before the gripping conclusion.
Along the way, Simonsen and his team face not just the dangers of finding and apprehending the killer, but also past memories that the investigation dredges up, and internal conflicts that each member of the team has to work through. And it is not just the team that deals with the past. There are powerful people who don't want these secrets uncovered, and will go to great lengths to keep it that way.
The Girl in the Ice is the second in the Konrad Simonsen series, following the highly-acclaimed The Hanging. First published in Denmark in 2010, the English translation for The Girl in the Ice, translated by Paul Norlen, was published by Bloomsbury: New York, London, in November, 2015.
Kelly Saderholm has written, blogged, and lectured about aspects of the mystery novel. She has moderated panels and presented papers at literary conferences, on both the Mystery Novel and Urban Fantasy. She is currently shifting from writing about mystery fiction to writing actual mystery fiction, and is working on a novel, as well as a non-fiction book dealing with Folklore in the American South. She is a recipient of a Kentucky Foundation for Women grant. She lives in South Central Kentucky with her family and two feline office assistants.
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