Helpful Score: 3
Locked Room Police Procedural, May 9, 2013
By Col. (ret.) Frank Stech, PhD
"House of Evidence" by Icelandic mystery writer Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson has the moving parts of a police procedural (thiink Ed McBain), with the static drama of a locked room mystery play (think Agatha Christie, only this time it is a locked house), and some clever use of time-traveling, as the century-old daily journal entries of one of the murdered victims hold most of the essential clues, once all the disparate evidence is assembled, which the murder squad in Reykjavik struggles to do. Ingolfsson's prose and style are spare, he lets his characters act out the dramas: a clueless thuggish bad cop, a decidedly dense and simple-minded murder squad commander, a semi-Asperger's forensics genius, and a very astute female detective, who should be running the show but [SPOILER ALERT] winds up ... well, not running things. The possible suspects and the victims are even more interesting, with sins and virtues as deeply and darkly hidden as the clues to this How-done-it. [SPOILER ALERT] Avid students of the Sherlock Holmes canon have a decided advantage, and if the Reykjavik murder squad hasn't poured through Watson's accounts of the Master's methods, they better get on it before Ingolfsson drops the next puzzler in their laps, and ours.
By Col. (ret.) Frank Stech, PhD
"House of Evidence" by Icelandic mystery writer Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson has the moving parts of a police procedural (thiink Ed McBain), with the static drama of a locked room mystery play (think Agatha Christie, only this time it is a locked house), and some clever use of time-traveling, as the century-old daily journal entries of one of the murdered victims hold most of the essential clues, once all the disparate evidence is assembled, which the murder squad in Reykjavik struggles to do. Ingolfsson's prose and style are spare, he lets his characters act out the dramas: a clueless thuggish bad cop, a decidedly dense and simple-minded murder squad commander, a semi-Asperger's forensics genius, and a very astute female detective, who should be running the show but [SPOILER ALERT] winds up ... well, not running things. The possible suspects and the victims are even more interesting, with sins and virtues as deeply and darkly hidden as the clues to this How-done-it. [SPOILER ALERT] Avid students of the Sherlock Holmes canon have a decided advantage, and if the Reykjavik murder squad hasn't poured through Watson's accounts of the Master's methods, they better get on it before Ingolfsson drops the next puzzler in their laps, and ours.
