The Valley: A Novel

From the author of The Body in the Bath comes Ragnar Jónasson next mystery featuring detective Hulda Hermannsdóttir, who must investigate a twenty-year-old unsolved missing child case.

On Christmas Eve in 1960, a man named Atli leaves his house in Reykjavík unlocked and walks through the snow to fetch some shopping bags from his car. When he gets back, he finds the front door locked, and no one answers his knocks. Immediately afraid for his wife and baby, fearing that an intruder might have got in while he was away, he starts trying to break down the door.

Twenty years later, in November 1980, Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir receives a call that new evidence has emerged in the case. Atli’s baby had vanished that night in 1960 and had never been seen again, but now, all these years later, his teddy bear has turned up in a fishing lodge in the north of Iceland.

Hulda heads north, accompanied, much to her chagrin, by Álfrún, the only other female officer in the CID. They soon establish that the teddy bear could only have been left there by one of eight people from the neighboring farms. Then, a storm blows in, cutting the power and telephone lines, and leaving the two policewomen isolated in the valley with the suspects. When one of the neighbors is found dead in his farmhouse, Hulda realizes that the case from the past is colliding with the present, and she must solve it before anyone else can be harmed.