The Girl By The Bridge is the second mystery for retired Detective Konrad, continuing characters from The Darkness Knows, which you will want to read first. Konrad is asked to help by friends of his wife, while becoming intrigued with a decades old cold case, seemingly unconnected. He is no longer a detective, so unrestrained by rules or politics.
His wife's friends are the grandparents of a granddaughter they tried to raise as their own, the mother deceased. They have given her everything, but she has left them for an addict boyfriend and the world of drugs, lately smuggling as a mule for known drug lords. Her body is soon found overdosed in her boyfriend Lassi's apartment. Accident, suicide, or murder? Konrad is asked to look into it. She had not delivered the drugs worth twenty million kroner, and Lassi is caught and violently tortured by two drug gang psychopaths.
In 1961, a young man crossing the bridge in the park discovers a doll in the water; pulling it out he finds the body of a twelve year-old girl. The girl lived in the shacks on the edge of town, and her death at the time was never properly investigated, the detectives incompetant or crooked, the hidden files now disappeared.
Konrad is still unsure what happened to his father who was killed many years ago - a con man who ran scams with a psychic; he will discover much more in this novel. The psychic's daughter Eyglo carries that burden too, and is clairvoyant herself. Konrad is not a believer in these things, but when he finds in old police files the drowning death of a young girl, Eyglo states that for many years she has been haunted by the image of this girl by the bridge. Perhaps she dropped her doll and fell in? or as Eyglo asserts, perhaps something more sinister. While the police team work the drug case, we learn more about Konrad as a troubled youth and his relationship with his father. Buried secrets will be unearthed, literally, as the girl's body is brought up, discoveries are made which tie all the cases together.
This is another excellent novel by Arnaldur Indridason, Iceland's premier crime novelist. It is best to have read the first in the series, as this continues Konrad's personal story. but his writing is always recommended.
There are four more in the Konrad series, which we will have to wait to be translated. Arnaldur has twice won the Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel, the CWA Gold Dagger Award, and the world's most lucrative crime fiction award, the RBA Award for Crime Writing.
My other reviews for Arnaldur Indridason:
The Darkness Knows (Konrad #1)
2018 (translated 2023) / Tradeback / 341 pages
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