Village in the Dark by Iris Yamashita is book number 2 in her Cara Kennedy series. It is a mystery thriller set in Alaska. Book 1 in the series is City Under One Roof. Cara Kennedy is an Anchorage Police Department Detective. She is on administrative leave after her husband and son disappear while on vacation in Point Mettier. Point Mettier is an isolated town where its residents all live in one high-rise.

In book one Cara finds some of the answers to her husband and son’s disappearance and they weren’t pleasant. (I’m not spoiling things by telling you what she discovered). Anyway at the end of the book she makes another discovery that leads her back to Point Mettier to see if she can find the final answers!

Village in the Dark is full of great characters.The story is told through the eyes of three women. First is obviously the main character Cara Kennedy. Second is the owner of a hotel within the Point Mettier high-rise Ellie and finally Mia, an Indigenous woman who left the village she grew up in to enter the White man’s world. The plot of the novel interweaves the lives of all three women. It’s really hard to say more without revealing too much!

Bottom Line

The bottom line is Village in the Dark is a really terrific read.  It;s filled with great quirky characters and a few twists here and there that kept me guessing, I really would recommend that you should read City Under One Roof before reading Village in the Dark. So check them both out!

Links for the Further Exploration of the Books of Iris Yamashita

Author’s Website

Goodreads

Instagraham

Facebook

Amazon

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My first introduction to the works of Ragnar Jonasson was Nightblind. I read Nightblind in 2018 and while i was reading book 2 in the series, the series was already up to book #5. Additionally, Ragnar started a second series in 2018 the Hidden Island series. That series was up to book #3 in 2021 when I read The Darkness.. Anyway, as I discovered the books I got really confused about what book number I read in what series! Here is book ! in the Hidden Iceland Series The Darkness

The Darkness

The Darkness features Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir of the Reykjavík police. A 64 year-old widow she is waiting out her time until she can retire at 65. However, her employers have other ideas and soon Hulda is forced into an early retirement. She is given two weeks to go home and wait until her official retirement begins.

Rather than being allowed to  continue to work  on her caseload, she is told she can work on a cold case of her choice.

Hulda chooses the case of a young Russian woman whose body had washed up on an Icelandic shore a year earlier. A cursory investigation was completed. The death was declared a suicide and the case is quietly closed.

As Hulda starts to dig into the case, she quickly realizes it may not have been a suicide but rather a murder.

As the novel progresses the reader is provided two parallel story lines told in flashbacks

One story line involves a mother who had to place her illegitimate baby daughter in a care facility because she couldn’t afford to take care of her. And their struggles throughout the child’s life.

The other story is about a young women who is taken on a trip to an isolated and dangerous valley in the Icelandic mountains.

All three converge to provide a very dramatic ending to The Darkness.

Gregg Hurwitz’s writes on the cover of The Darkness ..” I dare you not to be shocked” and I do too !!

Final Thoughts 

The bottom line – I really liked the book. I thought Hulda’s character the was both interesting and well developed. Additionally, I also know that I had some of the same feelings as I approached and moved into retirement. Now, I can’t wait to move onto The Island and The Mist

Links

Author’s Website
Goodreads
Amazon

About Ragnar Jonasson

Ragnar Jonasson is author of the award winning and international bestselling Dark Iceland series.

His debut Snowblind, first in the Dark Iceland series, went to number one in the Amazon Kindle charts shortly after publication. The book was also a no. 1 Amazon Kindle bestseller in Australia. Snowblind has been a paperback bestseller in France.

Nightblind won the Dead Good Reader Award 2016 for Most Captivating Crime in Translation.

Snowblind was called a “classically crafted whodunit” by THE NEW YORK TIMES, and it was selected by The Independent as one of the best crime novels of 2015 in the UK.

The post Ragnar Jonasson -The Darkness -Hidden Iceland #1 Starts a Thrilling Series! appeared first on .

The story revolves around the disappearance of several married women with children in Oslo. The disappearances are accompanied by the presence of a Snowman. Soon Harry Hole an alcoholic inspector with the Oslo Police Department, who is one of the few if not the only policeman with experience catching a serial killer is drawn into the case, after receiving a taunting letter from The Snowman alluding to Harry’s past history tracking a serial killer!

The plot is riveting with several twists and turns throughout the book leading to a very tense last one hundred pages! I enjoyed the character of Harry Hole and will go back and read the other books that are available to discover his full history. I thought that the translation was good and the words flowed well. For me sometimes translations get choppy or overly simplistic!

So until I can pick up another Harry Hole book it’s off to Iceland and another favorite series by Arnaldur Indridason featuring Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson. The book is Arctic Chill and  is the fifth book in the series that has been translated and the 7th overall.

The post Book 26 – The Snowman – Jo Nesbo appeared first on .

As always the characters are great, the pace of the book is fast and it keeps you guessing to the end what really happened! While the full development of the characters isn’t know until you read all of the books but you can probably pick this one up and read and enjoy it with having read the others.

One thing I noticed in the book that Maura’s hair is black not the color of Sasha Alexander’s hair in the TV series! But overall I think the TV series does a good job of translating the book to TV. Has anyone watched it?

The post Book 37 – Ice Cold – Tess Gerritsen appeared first on .

As always the characters are great, the pace of the book is fast and it keeps you guessing to the end what really happened! While the full development of the characters isn’t know until you read all of the books but you can probably pick this one up and read and enjoy it with having read the others.

One thing I noticed in the book that Maura’s hair is black not the color of Sasha Alexander’s hair in the TV series! But overall I think the TV series does a good job of translating the book to TV. Has anyone watched it?

The post Ice Cold – Tess Gerritsen appeared first on .

Ok so the last book I read Nowhere to Run by C.J.Box was the 10th book in the Joe Pickett series and now book number 17 The Narrows by Michael Connelly also the 10th book in the series featuring  Harry Bosch only difference is that I have read all the books in the Pickett series and this is my first Harry Bosch book! I had started The Concrete Blonde book # 3 years ago and for one reason or another couldn’t get into it so I never tried to read another Connelly book (the series is now up to 14). What was I thinking! I enjoyed this book, liked both the writing style and Bosch’s character and will certainly read more, having picked up several last week at the library book sale.

The book starts with Harry Bosch, asked by the widow of his former friend Terry McCaleb to investigate what she feels is the murder of her husband. McCaleb’s heart medicine (he had had a heart transplant -the storyline of the book and movie Blood Work)  had been switch with shark cartilage pills leading to a heart attack.

Meanwhile, FBI agent Rachael Walling receives a call that she has dreaded for eight years! Eight years earlier she had been involved in the chase to track done a serial killer known as The Poet, who turned out to be her former mentor at the FBI Robert Backus. The Poet is back and operating in the Las Vegas area. Harry’s investigation into McCaleb’s death quickly puts him on to the trail of The Poet and soon Bosch and Walling must join forces to catch Backus!

Like I said I enjoyed this book and the final pages flew by and I am certainly going to read more Bosch novels. I have a lot of catching up to do!!

My bookshelf at Goodreads.com now holds 796 books – 4 more to 800!! Next up the new Body Farm book by Jefferson Bass The Bone Thief another favorite series featuring Bill Brockton and the Body Farm at the University of Tennessee and while I root for Bill Brockton, this Florida Gator can’t root for the Volunteers!

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