Death at the Sanatorium

1983 At a former sanatorium in the north of Iceland, now a hospital ward, an old nurse, Yrsa, is found murdered. Detective Hulda Hermannsdottir and her boss, Sverrir, are sent to investigate her death. There they discover five suspects: the chief physician, two junior nurses, a young doctor, and the caretaker, who is arrested following false testimony from one of the nurses but is subsequently released. Less than a week after the murder, the chief physician is also found dead, having apparently fallen from a balcony. Sverrir rules his death a suicide and assumes he was guilty of the murder as well. The case is closed.

2012 Almost thirty years later, Helgi Reykdal, a young police officer who has been studying criminology in the UK, returns to Iceland when he is offered a job at the Reykjavík Police Department — the position Detective Hulda Hermannsdottir is about to retire from. He is a collector of golden-age detective stories and is writing his thesis on the 1983 murders in the north. As Helgi delves deeper into the past and begins his new job, he seeks out the original suspects, but soon finds only silence and suspicion at every turn as he tries to solve the mystery.