A man is making a crude leather mask with an iron spike fixed in the middle of the forehead. It is a "death mask," once used by Icelandic farmers to slaughter calves, and he has revenge in mind. Meanwhile, a school reunion has left Inspector Erlendur's colleague Sigurdur Óli unhappy with life in the police force. When a favor to a friend goes wrong and a woman dies before his eyes, Óli has a murder investigation on his hands.

"A luxury yacht crashes into a Reykjavik pier. But the boat is empty; no one is on board. What has happened to the crew? And what has happened to the family who were very much present when the yacht left Lisbon? What should Thora Gudmundsdottir, the series sleuth, make of the rumors that the vessel was cursed? She is spooked even more when she boards the yacht and thinks she sees one of the missing children. Where is Karitas, the glamorous young wife...

When the water level of an Icelandic lake suddenly falls following an earthquake to reveal a skeleton half-buried in its sandy bed, Inspector Erlendur, Elinborg, and Sigurdur Oli look into the long-unsolved disappearance of a young, left-wing student during the Cold War.

"When a [homeless man] he met regularly on the night shift is found drowned in a ditch, no one seems to care. But his fate haunts Erlendur and drags him inexorably into the strange and dark underworld of the city"--Amazon.com.

It is 1979, a few years after Reykjavík Nights closed, and Erlendur is now a detective, already divorced, and is working for the shadowy Marion Briem. A body of a man has been found in the blue lagoon, which has not yet become the tourist spot it is today. Apparently the victim fell from a great height, and at first the police investigate the possibility that he has been thrown out of an airplane. In parallel, Erlendur is asked to investigate the...

Inspector Erlunder has spent his entire career struggling to evade the ghosts of his past. But ghosts are visiting him, both in the form of a séance attended by a dead woman and in the reemerging puzzle of two young people who went missing thirty years ago. And there's the ghost of the detective's disastrous marriage, which, despite the pleas of his drug-addled daughter, he is unwilling to confront. He can only run from his ghosts for so long.