90. Jar City by Arnaldur Indridason

#3 Inspector Erlundur, 1st one published in English from Icelandic)
read on my iPhone, listened on Audio, AND watched the movie on Amazon Prime!
translated from Icelandic
2005 Minotaur - originally in 2000 in Iceland
275 pgs.
Adult Police Procedural/Murder Mystery
Finished 9/6/18
Goodreads rating:  3.8 - 19,061 ratings
My rating:  3.5
Setting: contemporary Reykjavik, Iceland

First line/s:  "The words were written in pencil on a piece of paper placed on top of the body."

My comments: I've had this book on my Kindle for years, and then got a cheap deal on audio, so had them both and finally decided to go for it.  Then I discovered it was hard listening to it because so many of the places and names in Iceland are almost incomprehensible for my weary brain.  But flipping back-and-forth between the text itself and the audio was really quite interesting.  And then I rented and watched the movie, made in Iceland with subtitles, an hour after I finished the book!
     Not only was this story/mystery itself incredibly dark, the setting was almost darker.  Although it was autumn, it was a dreary, constantly rainy autumn.  Erlunder, the detective protagonist, is a 50-ish, scruffy smoker, long divorced, with a daughter who is an addict.  She begins living off and on with him, and their relationship is ingrained into the story.  I'm not really sure how or why his investigation moves in the direction it does, but we immediately discover the dead man is a rapist, his few friends are criminal and crazy, and everything hinges around the death of a four-year-old boy 25 years previously.  The movie pretty much followed the book, though in a bit different order, but adding situations with the dead man's two accomplices that did change the story a bit.  Not sure how to rate this - I liked the setting and the characters, but the direction in which the plot moved so so improbable....

Goodreads synopsis:  When a lonely old man is found murdered in his Reykjavík flat, the only clues are a cryptic note left by the killer and a photograph of a young girl’s grave. Inspector Erlendur, who heads the investigation team, discovers that many years ago the victim was accused, though not convicted, of an unsolved crime. Did the old man’s past come back to haunt him?
          As the team of detectives reopen this very cold case, Inspector Erlendur uncovers secrets that are much larger than the murder of one old man--secrets that have been carefully guarded by many people for many years. As he follows a fascinating trail of unusual forensic evidence, Erlendur also confronts stubborn personal conflicts that reveal his own depth and complexity of character.