‘Reykjavík’, a crime novel recently published in Iceland to promising reviews (Egill Helgason, among others) was written by the prime minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir with the help of Ragnar Jónasson, bestselling author of the ‘Dark Iceland’ series (three million books sold in 36 countries). Jakobsdóttir claims she has been reading crime fiction all her life and she also wrote her master’s thesis on Icelandic crime novel, with special reference to the works of Arnaldur Indriðason, the original chart-topping master of the genre (more than 14m copies sold worldwide in 40 languages).
The novel is due out in the UK and US in August 2023: in the story, readers are invited on a journey back to the summer when Reykjavík celebrated its 200th birthday and when Iceland’s first private radio and TV stations first started broadcasting. Katrín Jakobsdóttir is not the former politician to publish Nordic Noir in Scandinavia: in Norway, the former justice minister Anne Holt successfully channelled her experiences into a crime series translated into 25 languages (the ‘Hanne Wilhelmsen’ and the ‘Vik/Stubø’ series). Read more on Theguardian.com