© Michael Ridpath 2009

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Well, I have finished my Icelandic detective novel.  It is titled Where the Shadows Lie and will be published by Corvus, a new imprint of Atlantic Books, probably in the June 2010.  This will be the first in a series of books featuring my detective, Magnus, of whom I have already grown quite fond.  He is an Iceland-born American homicide detective who is seconded to the Icelandic police.  The series will not be financial; this is a change of genre for me.

The idea seems to have been popular in Europe, and I have lined up publishers in Germany, France, Holland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Russia, Brazil and, I am very glad to say, Iceland.  Indeed I believe that the book will be published first in Iceland.

In this first book, Magnus Jonson is a key witness in an important trial in Boston, and is transferred to Iceland after the second attempt to kill him by friends of the defendants.  He immediately becomes involved in the investigation of the murder of a professor of Icelandic Literature at a summer house by a lake outside Reykjavik.  He discovers that two obsessive Lord of the Rings fans, an Englishman and an American, have been negotiating to buy a previously unknown ancient saga from the professor.  The saga was offered for sale by a young designer called Ingileif, whose father, a country doctor, died 18 years before in a storm on the side of the volcano Mount Hekla.

While trying to uncover the secrets of the small village in the shadow of the volcano, Magnus is hampered by the suspicion of the police inspector in charge of the investigation.  And all the time fellow gang members of the defendants in the trial in Boston come ever closer to discovering where Magnus is.  But Magnus's secondment to Iceland isn't just an escape from danger in Boston; it is an attempt to come to terms with his Icelandic past and family, and with the unsolved murder of his own father when Magnus was at college.  Every murder Magnus investigates is his father's unsolved murder, and in Iceland this is more true than ever.  

If you want to find out more, please do e-mail me at comments@michaelridpath.com

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