JAR CITY: AN INSPECTOR ERLENDUR NOVEL: AMALDUR INDRIDASON

My first Icelandic novel, another in the range of dark, somber Scandinavian mysteries.  Inspector Erlendur is the typical hard boiled detective, cranky, not very well liked, stubborn, tending to go his own way which upsets the higher ups.  And his life is a mess, though he's not a drunk as I recall; I finished it about a week ago and the story is beginning to fade.  His personal problems tend to overtake him at times, as his daughter is pregnant and a drug addict, unwilling to listen to her father, yet needing him at the same time, to get her life back together, to protect her unborn child.  They are at each others throats off and on during the novel, but finally seem to reconcile by the end.  There are two other stories, one involving a bride who disappears at her wedding; no one is overly concerned, thinking she has just run off, and Erlendur is helping the family find her.  The main story involves the seemingly simple murder of an older bachelor, known for his proclivities with women. He's bashed in the head by an ash tray, suggesting the killer was known to him.

It gets complicated when Erlendur discovers the murder victim raped a young women twenty five years ago, and she became pregnant.  When the Inspector Erlendur started to understand the man's sordid past, he begins to follow the threads that lead to the killer, multiple rapes by the victim, and eventually, the man dying at the hands of his own son, the child of rape.

It's much more complicated then that because of a hereditary illness which kills the son's four year old daughter.  He works for a DNA company and because of his daughter's death and his understanding of DNA, he traces his own DNA back to this awful man, the one who raped his mother, passed this lethal hereditary gene on to him and his daughter.

Thus, the motive is uncovered, the son found and he confesses.  As to the missing woman, she fled the wedding because her father, who had been molesting her since she reached puberty, hit on her at the wedding, so understandably, she fled only to be reconciled with her understanding husband in the end.  The end.