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Where the Shadows Lie is a new book from British author Michael Ridpath. It is about modern police work, the Icelandic sagas and The Lord of the Rings; all set in Iceland and in Boston. Sounds confusing, right?
Indeed, in terms of finding a market for the book and deciding where to focus scarce marketing money in the cutthroat world of publishing, it is a confusing mix-up of a book.
But from the care-free reader’s point-of-view it actually works exceedingly well.
At a time when murder mystery police novels are selling well – and ones by Nordic authors are selling even better – it might at first seem like Ridpath is climbing onto some sort of bandwagon. Then add in the fact that his novel is actually written about a group of other famous books and that assumption might seem confirmed. But it takes a certain amount of imagination to come up with a modern murder mystery connected to the Lord of the Rings trilogy; and Ridpath pulls it off. In fact I’d go as far as to say he pu
Oli and Magnus Jonson have spent years trying to escape from the shadows of their past. Raised by their grandparents in Bjarnarhöfn, a remote farmstead in Iceland, both brothers had to endure brutal violence at the hands of their grandfather - forever paying the price for their mother s alcoholism and untimely death. Now, two decades later, the past has returned to haunt them both. When Constable Páll Gylfason gets a dispatch call to investigate a suspected homicide in a remote farmstead, he is surprised to find that Detective Magnus Jonson is already at the scene. Magnus identifies the dead man as his estranged grandfather. As Páll begins to review the crime scene it becomes apparent that forensic evidence has been tampered with and that Magnus version of events doesn t add up. Before long, Magnus is arrested for the murder of his grandfather. When it emerges that his younger brother, Oli, is in Iceland after two decades in America, Páll begins to think that Magnus may not b