Detective Erlendur encounters memories of his troubled past in this gripping and award-winning continuation of the "Reykjavik Murder Mysteries". At a grand Reykjavik hotel, the doorman has been repeatedly stabbed in the dingy basement room he called home. It is only a few days before Christmas and he was preparing to appear as Santa Claus at a children's party. The manager tries to keep the murder under wraps. A glum detective taking up residence in his hotel and an intrusive murder investigation are not what he needs. As Erlendur quietly surveys the cast of grotesques who populate the hotel, the web of malice, greed and corruption that lies beneath its surface reveals itself. Everyone has something to hide. But most shocking is the childhood secret of the dead man who, many years before, was the most famous child singer in the country: it turns out to be a brush with stardom which would ultimately cost him everything. As Christmas Day approaches Erlendur must delve deeply into the past to find the man's killer. "Voices" is a tense, atmospheric and disturbing novel from one of Europe's greatest crime writers.
Though I enjoyed the first two books in this series, I found this one to be a little dull. I couldn’t get interested in the plight of Gudlaugur, the murdered Santa. We never got enough of a sense of who he really was to develop any sort of feelings about him. Despite the looming Christmas holidays and the transient nature of Erlendur’s pool of suspects, there was no sense of urgency or danger. Indridason likes to combine a couple of different storylines, and even the secondary plot, the mystery of the abused boy that Elinborg was investigating, fell flat. There was nothing to tie it into the overall story, and no solid resolution at the end. We did learn a little more about Erlendur as he stumbles through his life in his socially inept way, but even there there wasn’t much progress made, other than a little more understanding between him and his troubled daughter Eva Lind. If you’d like to try Indridason, I recommend his previous book, Silence of the Grave, but you can give this one a pass. I’ll probably read the next book because I enjoy reading about Indridason’s Iceland, but I’ll be hoping for a whole lot more.
