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Into Oblivion
Into Oblivion
Into Oblivion
Audiobook8 hours

Into Oblivion

Written by Arnaldur Indridason

Narrated by George Guidall

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

About this audiobook

It is a few years after REYKJAVIK NIGHTS closed, Erlendur is now a detective working for the shadowy Marion Briem and is already divorced. It is 1979. 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. As soon as they find out who he is - an engineer employed at the American base in Kaflavik - their focus shifts to the base and his work there, related to mysterious flights of classified planes between Greenland and Iceland. The authorities at the base are not willing to collaborate, in fact they do everything in their power to hinder the Icelandic police. Fully aware of the danger they are running, Erlendur and Marion continue investigating with the help of an officer from the base. In parallel, Erlendur is asked to investigate the cold case of a young girl vanished into thin air on her way to school forty years earlier.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 9, 2016
ISBN9781490673912
Into Oblivion
Author

Arnaldur Indridason

ARNALDUR INDRIÐASON won the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Silence of the Grave and is the only author to win the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel two years in a row, for Jar City and Silence of the Grave. Strange Shores was nominated for the 2014 CWA Gold Dagger Award.

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Reviews for Into Oblivion

Rating: 3.658119692307692 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

117 ratings11 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Icelandic Detective Novel....Narration in English by an Icelander. A little plodding. Takes place on and near the Air Base with the International (Kevlick?) Airport on it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    You don't have to know how to pronounce Arnaldur Indridason's name or the names of his characters to appreciate his novels, if that is your reason for avoiding them. The story is the thing, and his stories are superb, giving readers a peak into Icelandic culture along the way.“Into Oblivion” (2014) ranks high among Indridason's mysteries, or as his publisher persists in calling them, thrillers. Most of them are about police officers attempting to solve murders, so I call them mysteries.This story has two mysteries and two detectives. One thing Indridason tells us about Icelandic culture is that everyone is commonly known by his or her first name, so the police officers are Erlendur Sveinsson and Marion Briem, or 99 percent of the time just Erlendur and Marion. A man's body is found in a remote region, but an autopsy reveals the man must have fallen from a great height. Tall buildings are scarce in Iceland in 1979, when the story takes place, but there is a very large hangar at the U.S. Air Force base, and when the dead man is identified it turns out he worked as a mechanic on the huge Air Force planes serviced in that hangar. This leads to a turf battle between the local police and the Air Force.Yet while this is going on, Erlendur is distracted by a cold case from the 1950s in which a teenage girl left for school one morning and never got there. Officially the police have abandoned the case as unsolvable, but Erlendur has a passion for missing person cases. As a boy he and his brother had been lost in a fierce winter storm. Erlendur was found, but his brother was never seen again. Now he wants to discover what happened to the girl before all witnesses are dead.It turns out that the missing girl case is a better mystery, and more thrilling, than the other. Put together they make another excellent Indridason book. Or should I be calling him Arnaldur?
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    First crime novel by this author that I have read - was quite good - two murder mysteries for the price of one (one was a cold case that detective Erlendur, worked on in his spare time) - both successfully solved and kept me occupied on the couch during a heat wave - reading about atmospheric Iceland's cold climate was just the thing!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is the second book I have read by this author and I quite like them.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Iceland in the 70s: "Oblivion" by Arnaldur Indridason Published 2015.

    Who’s Marion? I wasn’t able to determine whether Marion was male or female. All indications of gender are absent, and because of that, the developing relationship between Marion and Caroline became more interesting than it might otherwise have been. The dynamics of the two characters don’t really shed light on it. Do they bond as they do because both are women in a largely male society (the time is the late 70s)? If one assumes Marion to be male, are we to see him as unusually devoid of the patronizing attitude toward women typical of the time? There seems to be little flirting between them if Marion is male, but quite a bit more if female. It's all interesting enough to make me nostalgic at never having learned Icelandic.

    You won’t find car chases, hanky-panky, and drunk detectives. Sorry. I know I shouldn't drop all these spoilers, but sometimes I can't help myself…
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I've read at least one other by this author, and his work fits well in the 'scandicrime' subgenre. This one takes us toward the beginning of his detective Erlander's career, and into his obsession with people who have been lost, the way his brother was lost in a blizzard many years before. It intertwines an old case with a new one dealing with an American airbase in Iceland.Well-written with interesting characters and conflicts.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I've enjoyed Indridason's Iceland-based crime series with detective Erlendur, and Into Oblivion is another winner. It's supposedly #2 in the series, yet it was just released- well after several others in the catalog have already been available. I'm not sure if that's intention- to fill in some gaps in Erlendur's early life- or if there are issues related to translation or publication in the US.

    Into Oblivion takes a step back to where Erlendur was a young, relatively new detective, just 33 years old circa 1979. He's initially pulled into the investigation of a man who is discovered with literally every bone in his body broken in a pond near a US airbase. A secondary plot involves his self-initiated review of a cold-case disappearance of a young lady from a couple decades prior.

    The pace of the story is fine and the writing is, as usual, pretty pedestrian (may have something to due with translation). The Erlendur character isn't as well developed as I would've expected if this is intended to be a 'prequel' to his later exploits. Other characters are hit and miss... the American MP liaison in particular wasn't very credible.

    The major problems I had were with the plot, the actions of several characters, and the unrealistic portrayal of the interactions with the US military personnel. They just weren't believable to me. Both major plots were concluded as expected, but I just had problems in how they 'got from here to there'. Otherwise, it's a good addition to the Erlendur series.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    All Erlandur mysteries contain a current case and a cold case and Into Oblivion is no exception. This second prequel pits Marion and Erlandur against the United States Navy, to some extent, in trying to solve the murder of an Icelandic laborer who worked on an American Naval base in Iceland.IntoOblivionTaking place in the late 1970s, Erlandur is also obsessed with the disappearance of an 18 year old girl, Dagbjort, who left her home one morning twenty five years earlier to walk to school and never arrived. Her body was never found.In the ‘main’ mystery, the body of Kristvin was found floating in a steamy lagoon by a female swimmer. The lagoon, very isolated and in close proximity to the Naval base, was thought to have curative powers over skin rash irritations. The autopsy suggests that he died from a fall from a high place onto a hard, flat surface, insinuating that the body was moved post mortem to the lagoon. The only place meeting such criteria is the mysterious Hanger 885, large enough to house the largest of military planes. As with all things military, cooperation was at a minimum. However Erlandur and Marion were able to enlist the aide of a military police woman, Caroline, who against orders, agrees to cooperate based on the mysterious nature of the hangar and rumors of related goings on.Of course, in the case of Dagbjort, Erlandur’s persistence, similar to that of Columbo, if you’re familiar with the American series, finally wears down several witnesses and uncovers new evidence.A bonus to readers is the history lesson they get in Icelandic/American military relations during the Cold War. As with most things political and military, Icelanders were split as to the benefits/detriments of having a U.S. military base on their soil.However, Indridason gives us little insight into Erlandur’s obsession with cold cases. There is an oblique mention of news reports regarding men freezing on a mountain climb. Additionally, there is little to glean about Erlandur’s and Marion’s relationship, although we do learn a few tidbits about her past.The one thing you can always count on, though, is a thoroughly enjoyable book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Another amazing addition to the Detective Erlender series. Arnaldur continues to reveal new depths to both his characters and his writing style. Emotionally poignant character writing and taut procedural work.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I have read all the other Erlendur stories that are in English translation and have really enjoyed both the portrayal of gloomy introspective Erlendur as a character and the descriptions of Iceland.This and Reykjavik Nights are prequels to the original Erlendur stories and Oblivion takes up Erlendur's story in 1979, a couple of years after he has joined CID and is under the command of Marion Briem (who has retired in the later stories).It has the familiar theme of Erlendur pursuing a missing person investigation, a "cold case" from 25 years earlier which occurred near the old World War 2 US base, then occupied by the poorest Icelanders, and a murder mystery (discovered in the area where the Blue Lagoon now is), with the contemporary theme of murky goings on at the US Army/Navy Icelandic base (at Keflavik).These stories have narrative drive, but I had a feeling of Indridason "writing by numbers". He knows what pleases his readers and he provides that, but there is insufficient depth to Erlendur's character. This story reads as if it is merely confirming the back story provided in the later books.It passed the time and provided a fix of Icelandic descriptive scenery, but it did not satisfy. Read this when you have read the other stories and still want more.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In 4.6. STRANGE SHORES, #11 in the Erlendur series, published in 2011, we thought we had farewelled Erlendur, who seemed to be becoming increasingly troubled in the later novels in the series.But now Indridason has begun publishing "prequel" novels which tell stories from before JAR CITY, the first Erlendur novel published in English in 2004. Erlendur has recently joined CID and already comes across as preoccupied with people who have been lost in Iceland's severe weather.I'm not sure whether the author thinks that readers new to his novels will read these books first or whether he is mainly catering for those who have already followed Erlendur through the published series. I brought to OBLIVION a knowledge of what happened in the later series, and so already knew some of Erlendur's background. I rather think he is exploiting what he sees as a ready market created by the series published in English 2004-2011.The Erlendur of OBLIVION is without doubt the same detective that filled the pages of the original series, and picks up on themes that surface in that series. But for me there was just something slightly "thin" about the story. Creating prequels must create continuity problems of a unique kind.It does explore the ramifications of Iceland allowing itself to be used as a military base for US army and navy, and how that affects Icelandic sovereignty.