THE DRAINING LAKE

THE DRAINING LAKE
Arnaldur Indridason
Harvill Secker, 400 pp,, about $18 paperback



I don’t really know how to pronounce the author’s last name (there’s a strange accent in there), but that doesn’t matter. What a great read!

This is an engrossing tale set partly in Iceland, where a body is found, weighted down with old Russian radio equipment, in a lake where the water is draining away. The other part tells the story of some socialist university students, some of them Icelanders, back in 1950s-60s Leipzig, in communist East Germany.

Though the book is translated from the Icelandic, Indridason’s style comes through. He skillfully balances the story of the Icelandic police investigation (and investigators) against the tale of dark days in Cold War Leipzig, where students are encouraged, even forced, to inform on each other. In that regard, the book is a good reminder of how much we ought to appreciate and protect our liberties here in the USA.

This is technically, I guess, a “police procedural” book, but with much more range than most of the interview-interview-chase-chase-solve books in the genre that I read. That’s because the historical perspective that illumines the story is so gripping.

In some ways “The Draining Lake” is dark, and some might see the book as depressing. I worked for a while in Finland and got used to the quiet characters of these northern people. Indridason puts me in mind of the Finns I worked with. They aren’t like us Americans. “Still waters run deep” is the old saying, and it works for the detectives in the story and for the disillusioned students in their later years.

I loved this book!