{"id":8404,"date":"2019-03-14T15:04:13","date_gmt":"2019-03-14T15:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/?p=8404"},"modified":"2019-04-06T14:07:01","modified_gmt":"2019-04-06T13:07:01","slug":"the-island-by-ragnar-jonasson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2019\/03\/the-island-by-ragnar-jonasson\/","title":{"rendered":"The Island by Ragnar J\u00f3nasson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It\u2019s 1988, many years before the events recounted in the first of the Hidden Iceland trilogy, The Darkness<\/a>. A pair of teenagers have headed out to a remote summer house for a weekend of passion \u2013 but things don\u2019t go quite the way they\u2019d planned. Next thing, the girl\u2019s father has been arrested and charged with the murder of his daughter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We fast forward another ten years, and Hulda Hermannsdottir\nis in America, trying to track down her father. Her mother never told her who\nhe was, but he was stationed in a US base in Iceland and she has a first name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, back in Iceland, the friends of the girl who\u2019d\ndied ten years earlier have gathered together to celebrate her \u2013 this time on a\nremote island. Again, things don\u2019t quite go as planned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s into this mess that Hulda returns from America, looking\nto work out whether a new death was an accident or murder. And how are two\nevents related?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not uncommon in crime novel series for the individual\ntitles to be relatively standalone for new readers, but in this case, I\u2019d\nstrongly recommend going back to The Darkness and reading these titles in\norder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We know from the earlier book that Hulda is someone who\u2019s a\nbit of a loner, and feels as though her career is stagnating. Once more, it\nfeels as though there\u2019s been sloppy detective work –  J\u00f3nasson does not portray the Icelandic police\nservice in glowing light in these books. And as ever, there are lots of hidden things\nbelow the surface, brooding away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s absolutely certain is that the story is another real page-turner, and the remote settings provide a distinct flavour. My only frustration is that we\u2019ll need to wait until 2020 to learn the conclusion to this series!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thanks to Penguin UK, Michael Joseph and Netgalley for the ARC. The Island<\/a> is published in hardback on 4 April 2019.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s 1988, many years before the events recounted in the first of the Hidden Iceland trilogy, The Darkness. A pair of teenagers have headed out to a remote summer house for a weekend of passion \u2013 but things don\u2019t go quite the way they\u2019d planned. Next thing, the girl\u2019s father has been arrested and charged […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8452,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[108],"class_list":["post-8404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-books-2"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8404"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8405,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8404\/revisions\/8405"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}