The Girl in the Ice

By Lotte Hammer and Søren Hammer

Under the heartless vault of the Greenland's arctic sky the body of a girl is discovered. Half-naked and tied up, buried hundreds of miles from any signs of life, she has lain alone, hidden in the ice cap, for twenty-five years. Now an ice melt has revealed her.

When Detective Chief Superintendent Konrad Simonsen is flown in to investigate this horrific murder and he sees how she was attacked, it triggers a dark memory and he realises this was not the killer's only victim. As Simonsen's team work to discover evidence that has long since been buried, they unearth truths that certain people would rather stayed forgotten, disturbing details about the moral standing of some of Denmark's political figures are revealed and powerful individuals are suddenly working against them. But the pressure is on as it becomes clear that the killer chooses victims who all look unsettlingly similar, a similarity that may be used to the investigators' advantage, just so long as they can keep the suspect in their sights…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jul 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781408845776

Lotte Hammer

LOTTE AND SOREN HAMMER are siblings. A Price for Everything is the second book in a series following Detective Konrad Simonsen and his team. Their first book, The Hanging, was published in English in 2013. The writing pair have a huge following throughout Europe.

Reviews for The Girl in the Ice

[hanneri_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was hard work in places. I generally enjoy the Scandinavian crime writers, but this did not flow. There were elements in the story telling that annoyed me and that I just simply didn't believe. And the characters were interesting for the most part but there wasn't enough depth to make them clear.

[t_k_elliott · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book kept me reading when I had other things I really should have been doing...

What I Liked
Erika. As a protagonist, and as a person, I liked her. She's bright, she's logical, and she knows how to lead her team. The way Bryndza wrote her, you could imagine her as the kind of boss who is liked, but above all respected.

I also liked that Bryndza did not gave in to any temptation to make her Tortured Past completely dark. It felt real.

Moss and Peterson - Erika's two subordinates, who jointly perform the function of Robin to her Batman. Also Woolf, the desk sergeant. This is a fast-moving book, more action than character, but Bryndza still managed to get across that Erika very quickly gained Moss and Peterson's loyalty as an investigative unit of three, but also gained Woolf as "her man" at slightly more distance.

The Plot had some twists I didn't see coming. :-)

What I Liked Less
Coincidences - there were a couple of important coincidences, strokes of extreme good luck, just when the investigation seemed to have hit a brick wall. One, I could buy - more than that, not so much.

Factual errors - I spotted a couple; not terribly important to the story, but irritating. A good editor should have spotted them (as well as a couple of grammatical word-choice errors).

Weird pacing - right at the end, the writing seemed to lose its way a bit. Bryndza seems to be less good at writing dialogue in very tense situations, and at the very end, some incredibly important stuff happened "off page". At one moment, we're on the edge of our metaphorical seat, wondering what's going to happen next - and the next, it's all over. We never get to watch the climax as it happens - it's like having a conversation on a mobile when you're going through a tunnel: you get all the build-up to the scandalous revelation about exactly what Mary was seen doing with That Man at George's wedding, then reception fails and by the time you get the connection back, the conversation's moved on to double glazing. It's as if Bryndza didn't think he could write it well enough, so he chickened out.

Conclusion
Will I read the next one? Almost certainly, yes. I want to see what Erika has to deal with next, and I want to see her consolidate her team.