TWO DEAD BILLIONAIRES

In Sheldon’s debut crime novel, the murder of a controversial billionaire rocks Iceland.

Detective Hekla Rafney Fritzdóttir of Iceland’s National Bureau of Investigation has just caught a particularly sensational case: Someone has slit the throat of American billionaire Jack Drumman at one of the country’s most luxurious spas. It’s Hekla’s first murder investigation, and the first murder Iceland has seen in three years—the fame of the victim means that all eyes will be on her as she tries to figure out what happened. Drumman was the paranoid founder of a surveillance tech company, a line of work that created innumerable enemies. “So the question of who would want to kill Jack was rhetorical—anyone with a conscience would,” thinks Hekla. Police soon zero in on a suspect, however: Security footage shows that Aldís Eva, a radical journalist and particularly vocal critic of Drumman, visited the spa the day of the murder. Aldís has since gone missing, and the search to locate her leads Hekla to August Sorenson, a Danish citizen and former FBI legal attaché in Copenhagen. August is tortured by his past and deeply depressed, but the news that Aldís, who he once knew and deeply respects, is wanted for murder reawakens something in him. When a second billionaire—Iceland’s richest man and an associate of Drumman’s—also winds up dead, it becomes clear there is more to this case than there seems to be. Sheldon’s tight prose hews closely to his characters’ inner monologues, particularly those of the suicidal August, to whom the reader is given more access than the stoic Hekla: “But there was another truth that he could no longer deny—this life wasn’t enough anymore,” he thinks, shortly after their first meeting. “He was less than a half-hour removed from trying to end it with a belt for fuck’s sake. He was sad—miserable—and was clearly getting worse.” The characters’ politics take the plot to unexpected places, and the reader is happy to follow.

An icy Scandinavian crime novel with plenty going on beneath the surface.