Reykjavik
In 1956, 14-year-old Lara takes a summer job for a couple on the small island of Videy off the Reykjavik coast and vanishes one August morning without a trace. Thirty years later, as Reykjavik prepares to celebrate its 200th anniversary in 1986, young journalist Valur Robertsson reopens the case for a magazine series. The investigation pulls in the surviving members of the family Lara worked for, an Icelandic political class with secrets the post-war generation buried, and an unsolved-disappearance pattern Valur did not expect. Jonasson and Jakobsdottir co-wrote the book and split the chapters so readers cannot tell which author wrote which section, and the novel landed on the New York Times Best Crime Novels of 2023 list at release.
What you might want to know about Reykjavik
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A 1986 Reykjavik journalist reopens the 30-year-old case of a girl who vanished from a small Icelandic island in this 2023 cold-case Nordic noir co-written by an Icelandic prime minister.
Reykjavik was co-written by Ragnar Jonasson and Katrin Jakobsdottir and published in Icelandic in 2022. Katrin Jakobsdottir was the Prime Minister of Iceland from 2017 to 2024.
No. Reykjavik is a standalone, separate from Ragnar Jonasson's Dark Iceland (Ari Thor) series and Hidden Iceland trilogy. Each of his series is independent.
Reykjavik is 336 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Reykjavik takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Reykjavik is a standalone novel by Ragnar Jonasson, not part of a series.
Reykjavik is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.