The Girl by the Bridge had a really good concept, but the execution left a lot to be desired. I would like to say a lot got left in translation, but I have read quite a few Nordic Noir as I enjoy them tremendously and the translators are typically fantastic, so I think it's actually the writing style as well as the actual plot. I did read this author is one of the top Scandinavian crime fiction authors, so maybe it was the translation? It's hard to say.

Konrad is a retired police detective and is quite content to enjoy his retirement, away from the hustle and bustle of crime and solving mysteries. When his neighbour approaches him to help locate his missing granddaughter, he doesn't really want to get involved, but becomes interested despite himself. But the author makes a big deal about his need to stay uninvolved, and for me, this crept into the story and into his personality as I didn't find his character enjoyable. While I don't mind introspection, his rambling inner monologue was repetitive and went on and on, interrupting the flow of the story and making a rather slow plot even slower as a result. I know that this character had been a character in multiple books, but that doesn't change the fact that he rambled, his inner dialogue was rather annoying, and the author went for way too long about how uninterested he was in crime.

While I did think the plot was interesting, I also thought it was a victim of overkill. There were so many things happening the author didn't have a chance to really focus or highlight any one of them so it appeared to a rambling mess. However, the descriptions of Reykjavik were excellent, and I really got a sense of the place that the author knows very well. I enjoy reading books set in places that I know little about and like comparing the justice and legal systems as I find it fascinating. So many tourists only see the beautiful spots and don't see the heartbreak and the struggles facing many Icelanders on a day-to-day basis so I appreciated learning more about that. The bleak atmosphere was really perfect for this story.

Verdict
The Girl by the Bridge had a great atmosphere, showing the world the real Iceland and the struggles faced by the people who live there. While I don't mind a slow-burn story, this one struggled to pique my interest because the characters were rather shallow and one-dimensional, the plot was humdrum and pretty predictable and suffered from too much happening syndrome. In the end, the author needed to pick one or two story lines, developed them, and save the others for future books. ( )

I was looking forward to another book from Idridason but was disappointed when I finished it. It felt very disjointed. There are three different but somehwhat intertwined cases: as always, Konrad is trying to find out who killed his father. The second case concerns a girl who died as a result of an overdose. Was it accidental or murder. Finally there is a cold case of a girl who drowned in a pond years ago. It was ruled accidental death. Was it accidental or murder.

There is a paranormal element to the drowning death.

Overall, not up to Indridason standards. ( )

A poet searching for a perfect line noticed a doll floating beneath a bridge where he stood, but when he tried to retrieve it, he found something else: the body of a girl who apparently had fallen in and drowned. Years later, Konrad, a retired detective and sometimes private investigator, is contacted by a friend who has been seeing disturbing visions of the girl. Their fathers had been involved in a scam, setting up seances for desperate people who had lost loved ones, but she has a genuine gift. Konrad is skeptical of all things paranormal, but agrees to find out what he can about the long-ago investigation, conducted by a sloppy, incompetent cop and a medical examiner who lost records of the body. As he teases out tiny threads of information, he pulls on other mysteries concerning his father and associate. For another case, he's looking the teenage daughter of a retired politician; she turns up dead of an overdose - another seeming accident that has deeper dimensions.

I was disappointed in an earlier book in this series, partly because I missed Erlendur (protagonist of another series) and partly because Konrad seemed too gloomy and depressive to want to spend time with. But this was an excellent mystery. Not only is it brilliantly plotted, I found myself enjoying the dogged, tired kindness of the protagonist. Maybe I was just not in the mood before. In any case, I'm looking forward to future entries in this series.

Cold Case Again for Konráð
Review of the Vintage Digital Kindle eBook edition (March 23, 2023) translated by Philip Roughton from the Icelandic language original "Stúlkan hjá brúnni" (The Girl by the Bridge) (2018).

This is the 2nd of the full-length Konráð novels, following The Darkness Knows (Icelandic original 2017/English translation 2021). Konráð also appears in a cameo role in the 1st book of the Reykjavik Wartime Mysteries series The Shadow District (Icelandic original 2013) where he retraces the steps of an earlier case by the wartime Flóvent and Thorson team. You could list the latter book as Konráð #0.5.

The pattern of the Konráð books is that the retired detective is asked to look into a present day case, usually as a favour, which has some sort of tie-in to an earlier cold case. In the background there is a running plot line of Konráð looking for possible clues to his own father's murder during the war years in Iceland.

In The Girl by the Bridge, the story opens in 1961 with a scene of a young poetry writer finding at first a doll and then a young girl's body in the water by a bridge. We learn later that the case was deemed an accidental death with no further follow-up. In the present day, Konráð is asked by friends of his late wife Erna to investigate the disappearance of their granddaughter. Konráð's psychic friend Eygló, the daughter of a onetime partner of Konráð's father in séance scams, is seen having visions of the earlier death. Konráð reluctantly takes on the current case, but the earlier case proves to not have been an accident after all.

I am really enjoying the two recent series by Arnaldur Indriðason, who is otherwise best known for his Inspector Erlendur series. I find it a bit surprising that the English translations are so many years behind the Icelandic originals as I think of Arnaldur as being one of the most popular of present day Icelandic authors. One further Flóvent and Thorson Petsamo (#3 from 2016) and two further Konráð Tregasteinn (#3 from 2019) & Þagnarmúr (#4 from 2020) are yet to be translated into English. ( )

You know exactly what you're going to get with Arnaldur: skillfully executed dark, grim, depressing, cold. Plenty of brooding over past crimes and miseries. Complicated intermeshed past and present; conflicted characters, blood, multiple deaths, and maybe a car chase or a suicide or two. A perfect evening's light entertainment. I had the struts of the plot(s) figured out pretty quickly, though one red herring tripped me up for a time. And one of the main crimes is still not settled, but I have my own ideas about where that might go. If you like this sort of thing (and I do), this is the sort of thing you'll like. Competent and compelling enough to finish in a long evening where I appreciated the distraction. ( )