"THE DRAINING LAKE" by Arnaldur Indridason (A)

This outstanding 2004 novel by Icelandic author Arnaldur Indridason is finally out in an English edition, and it is a literary revelation! It is not often that I have the great pleasure of reading a book with story lines so beautifully and brilliantly interwoven into the fabric of a complex plot.

This novel reads like a well-oiled race car once the initial adjustment to the rather discordant Icelandic places and names has been made. This book certainly takes a little longer than usual to get up to speed for the simple reason that many of the characters and all of the place names have spellings that are so alien to us that it sometimes feels that it is partly written in a foreign language.

Once that linguistic adjustment has been made, then the thrill becomes one of discovering an extraordinarily talented author. I highly recommend that you share in my delight. This third novel is a captivating thriller by an author whose first novel, "Jar City," was made into a movie which was the Icelandic submission for Best Foreign Language film for 2007. He later won the CWA (Crime Writer's Association of Great Britain) Gold Dagger Award for his second novel, "Silence of the Grave."

Indridason has a special talent for fleshing out characters in a manner that leaves them portrayed as extraordinarily sympathetic human beings no matter how flawed they may be. In a world filled with moral choices and compromises, it is the ones who compromise the less who are the heroes and the ones who compromise more the villains.

Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson, the main character in this story, is presented as a whole package, warts and all, in a touchingly sad but realistic portrait of a man who makes a wonderful investigator because he is always searching for what he has lost in his own life. Erlendur is a shadow of a man who has repeatedly suffered loss, starting during his childhood when his younger brother was swept away in an avalanche right before his eyes and never seen again. This tragedy scarred his life and has led to a personal preoccupation with books about missing persons, especially those who have been lost in avalanches.

His life as an emotional shell of a human being has led to the breakup of his marriage and the deep estrangement from his two children. His former wife hates him and won't have anything to do with him. His son, Sindri Snaer, drops in and out in a mostly futile effort to awaken parental responsibility in his father. His daughter, Eva Lind, is a drug addict who searches for father figures in her drug dealers, all the while inwardly hopeful that Erlendur may become a real father to her.

Erlendur's preoccupation with loss and the missing has led to a career as an investigator with a special affinity for finding connections between two or more apparently unconnected occurrences. That is why he was hired in the first place by his former boss, Marion Briem, a woman who has the same intuition that he does. She had earlier recognized that he wouldn't be just another unimaginative cop who would only operate by the book. They were never close, but now he finds himself dependent upon her trenchant observations made while she is lying in a hospital bed dying from cancer after a lifelong addiction to smoking.

Erlendur works with his two fellow Reykjavik inspectors, Elínborg and Sigurdur Óli. Sigurdur is happily married to Bergthóra and Elínborg has just published a cookbook to considerable acclaim, so she and her husband, Teddi, make the media rounds after her work day is over.

Sigurdur seems to be the senior officer, but they defer to the quiet and tormented Erlendur since they both realize that he has a well-developed nose for connecting the dots in totally disconnected incidences. In this fascinating tale, a local hydrologist researching the water level in Lake Kleifarvatn discovers a skeleton lying in the sand bottom of the now bare lake bed. In a freak geologic situation, the lake level has been slowly dropping after a recent earthquake, and it is assumed that volcanic fissures had opened up a drain beneath the lake.

The case assumes criminal overtones when it is discovered that the skull has a hole in it which appears to have been created by the blow from a hammer. Murder is unusual in Iceland, and the fact that the body had been weighted down by a radio transmitter dating from the 1960's implies that the murder had taken place sometime after that period.

A search of the records of missing persons begins. Erlendur is strangely intrigued by a farm equipment salesman who went out on a sales call and never returned to his girlfriend. She has waited for him ever since. His brand new 1967 black Ford Falcon was found at a station with a hubcap missing. Earlier investigations had concluded that he had run away or had committed suicide, but Erlendur is intrigued by that missing hubcap. It's strange little oddities like this, things that everyone else assumes are unimportant, that he latches onto for a clue that may be vitally important.

Erlendur is deeply sympathetic to the woman, now seventy years old, who has waited all these years for news of her lover. He understands her feeling of loss, for both of them have waited decades for someone they have loved to walk in the door once again.

In a case with more than a strong dose of Cold War overtones after the radio transmitter is found to have been built by a Soviet block country for intercepting transmissions from the American air base nearby, this story moves back and forth in time and place from Iceland to Leipzig, East Germany, where during the Fifties and Sixties promising young Icelandic socialist students were sent to study at the university during a time when East Germany was riddled with Stasi spies. Some adapted well to the regimentation, but others only found tragedy. 2004, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martins Minotaur, 312 pages.