"Hypothermia" by Arnaldur Indridason (Hervill Secker, 2009)

Iceland. Karen, arriving at friend Maria's lakeside cottage, finds that Maria's hung herself. Erlender, a policeman, breaks the news to Maria's husband Baldvin. Erlender's son Sinderi and daughter Eva both have/had drug/drinking problems. He hasn't spoken to his wife Halldora for a long while. Eva would like him to.

2 years before, Maria's mother had died. When she was 10 she'd seen her father die in a boating incident by the cottage. A few months after, as promised, Maria's mother had appeared to Maria. Maria had been to a medium. Erlender listens to the tape.

A dying man asks Erlender if there's news about his son David who disappeared decades before. Erlander checks the case, finding that the son might have become friendly with a girl just before he disappeared. He also checks an old case where a female student Duna/Gudrun disappeared. He says he's checking these case for a Nordic project on suicides. He tries to determine the cause of the boat accident. He discovers that Tryggvi, a friend of Baldvin in his acting days, was involved in an experiment where his heart was stopped to see if there was an afterlife.

Erlander has a female friend Valgedur. Erlender's meeting with Halldora goes badly - neither had wanted to meet. She claims that he walked out. It's true that he didn't try to share custody. He reads Eva 5 pages from a book - an account of his brother's death. He and his brother had been stuck in a snowdrift. He visits Kristin, Maria's aunt, who tells him that Magnus was about to go off with another woman when he had the accident, and that his wife knew.

He learns that there were 3 in the boat and that Maria's mother pushed her father over the side in an argument. He visits Karolina, who was a student actor when Baldvin was. They'd met up again 5 years before and had become close friends. He meets Solveig, who had been Maria's father's lover. Leonora knew.

He thinks that Maria wanted to replicate the Tryggvi experiment. He thinks that Baldvin set her up with a medium (actally Karolina) who encouraged her. She unexpectedly recovered after the incident but killed herself anyway. A car is find in a lake. A man and a woman's body is in there - not suicide.

Other reviews

• Maxine Clarke (There are no dramatics in this story, no exciting set-pieces or thrilling climaxes. The book is simply a rich, thoughtful, mature and compelling work)
• Joe Hartlaub (Just about everyone in HYPOTHERMIA is a little bit off mentally, and Indridason does an incredible job of melding plot with character to create a bleak, gray storyscape that shimmers vaguely at the edges)
• readingmatters (there are constant recurring themes and motifs, particularly of lakes (Maria’s father drowned in one, the missing girl had an obsession with them), hypothermia (its power to kill, both accidentally and on purpose), suicide (“the act itself frequently came as a total shock and could be committed by people of all ages: adolescents, the middle-aged and elderly”), the after-life (does it exist and how do you prove it?), and being haunted by ghosts, both physical and metaphorical (“You have to free yourself from this ghost,” Eva Lind, Erlunder’s daughter, tells him, referring to the loss of his brother; “It’s because of Maria; she’s haunting me like an old ghost story,” Erlunder tells Baldvin, when he wants to know why Erlunder is hassling him about her suicide.))