Ragnar Jonasson is a highly acclaimed Icelandic writer who I had never heard of before reading The Girl who Died.
Una has taken a job as a school teacher in a remote Icelandic community to escape from her stifling life in Reykavik. the only problem is that the tiny village only has 10 residents and they are both unnaturally close to each other and unfriendly to outsiders. Una struggles to assimilate or to build a relationship with her two pupils. She has brief sightings of an unknown girl that no one acknowledges but perhaps she has been drinking too much.
Then a young girl is found dead and with only 9 people left in the village suspicion starts to grow.
This is dark and sort of scandi atmospheric but overall it is unsatisfying, I pressed on to the end but didn’t really care how it would resolve.
2/5