Jar City

"This is Icelandic and it’s the first in the series. Another miserable cop and the backdrop of Iceland which is bleak and rainy or snowy. The cop has a daughter who’s a junkie and he doesn’t see much of his kids. I chose this one because it could only have been set in Iceland, could only have been about Iceland. The plot is all about the human genome discovery and stuff. I won’t go into it but it has these medical and scientific projects going on and the jars are the test tubes and jars with parts of the body in them. I suppose it’s traditional. It started in the States with Philip Marlowe – you know, they drink too much and are flawed in some way. If you have to follow this guy through half a dozen books it’s more interesting if he’s flawed. He has to keep your interest. I mean, Ruth Rendell’s Wexford who is happily married and all that, he gets very boring after a while. It’s like virtual travel. It’s not only a good novel but you get a sense of another country and of that country’s preoccupations. There is a lot of morality in a way and the novels are much more literary, more philosophical. I know Karin Fossum sees herself as a descendent of Ibsen. You don’t get all the slash and rip, car chasey, pacy stuff that you get in a lot of American and now British novels."