A young woman’s death and the body of a girl found by a bridge in a pond touches the back recesses of memory waiting to come forward for retired Detective Konrad.
Scandi noir is something I normally enjoy, especially Indridason’s Detective Konrad works, but I found this title really hard to identify with.

Good story. It is the second novel of this author and I really liked. The plot is very interesting, the characters are reliable and finally there are the description of Reykjavík and Iceland.
I want to thanks NetGalley and St.Martin Press for the ARC.

Detective Konrad, book 2

With this latest, Mr. Indridason shows beyond doubt that he is a superb crime fiction virtuoso. Tasked by an elderly couple to find their wayward missing granddaughter retired Detective Konrad investigates the case. But soon started he is derailed by a strange connection to a little girl who drowned in the city pond decades ago....while in the back of his mind is the fate of his father who was stabbed to death decades ago.....

This is another perfectly fit the Nordic Noir mould with a detective haunted by his past , multiple crimes to solve, horrors of sexual abuse, torture and drugs use. Set mainly in the cold and dark city of Reykjavik, Mr. Indridason short and succinct sentences conveys very well a bleak atmosphere to his narration to give us chills along the way. But the stilted flow of sentences and the rambling narrative may be an annoyance to some. You have to pay attention and not let you mind drift in order to enjoy this mystery at its fullest.

It starts with scenes from the 60’s and transports us to the present day with a storyline that dabbles in ghosts, clairvoyance and questionable events or scenes. This story is full of turns and red herrings and the ending leaves a pleasant surprise....I didn’t like most of the characters, although well-drawn I couldn’t care less what happened to them.

“The Girl by the bridge” is a good mystery and a great way to spend time with but once read fast forgotten.

Interesting novel, following retired detective Konrad as he's asked by concerned grandparents to investigate the disappearance of their 20 year-old granddaughter Danni.

Konrad has always been haunted by the death of his father some twenty years before, a murder that is as yet unsolved. When Danni is found dead, of a drug overdose, and her boyfriend is missing, the question becomes whether Danni's overdose was intentional or accidental. Who is she mixed up with?

Konrad talks to his friend Eyglo, whose father was involved with Konrad's father before his death, and Eyglo shares her concerns that Danni's death is connected to the death of a young girl many years before. A poet had been crossing a bridge when he saw a doll floating in the water. When he bent to retrieve the doll, he discovered the body of a 12 year old girl. Her family never believed the official story that she had accidentally drowned. Eyglo, a psychic, has had several visions of the young girl and the doll.

Once Konrad digs deeper, connections to the death of his father are raised, as well as issues with the investigation of the girl's death all those years ago.

I found this an interesting read, the first Icelandic Noir I have read. The translation felt a little off at times for me, with words that seemed to be used incorrectly in a few places. The setting is important to the story - Reykjavik adds a lot of atmosphere as the backdrop to these crimes.

I realize now that this is not the first book that has featured Konrad, and it might have been good to start with the earlier books to understand his character a little better.

Standard Nordic Noir, this complex book centers on a prior act of a dead girl's body and a current missing daughter who is involved in drugs.

A whirling dervish of a book the writing is straight forward and engaging from the start to the finish. Just be sure to pay close attention as the story line does twist and turn.

Indridason’s novels are very distinctive mysteries. They have his own style and are always consistently good. The Girl by the Bridge is no exception. There is a new case that Konrad takes reluctantly and eventually becomes a police matter, which is when Marta gets called in. As usual, the plot also includes a historical mystery involving the ghost of a girl and a creepy doll. The way the clues are doled out, the suspects and allies that Konrad finds along the way and the wonderful character development make this a wonderful novel. The action moves back and forth, and the author’s descriptions are so perfectly atmospheric, that it’s easy to set each part in its historical context. Many of the issues will also be familiar to longtime readers. Even if the rhythm is not thriller-fast, some parts are very suspenseful, including a scene where Konrad is stuck in traffic. If anyone can make a traffic jam interesting, you know he’s good. Indridason takes his time telling these stories, but he makes them count.
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, #NetGalley/#St. Martin's Press, Minotaur Books!

Too slow for me

I really like Iceland, but I had trouble getting into this book and it was just too easy to put down. I guess it just wasn't for me.

I love the writing style used by this author. Short, succinct sentences that convey the sense of the cold Icelandic setting. This is a cold case for Konrad, one brought to his attention by his friend, Eyglo. There is just a hint of supernatural influence which was just enough. A young girl’s drowned body is found in a pond, put down to natural causes 20 years earlier when it occurred. But is there more to this story?

Meanwhile, Konrad has been asked to find the granddaughter of some family friends. When the girl is found, it brings up many additional questions. Konrad is reluctant to be involved after his retirement from the police force. The stories are slowly tied together and the story unfolds through witnesses from the past and present.

I see this is the second book in the Konrad series. I am definitely planning to read the first as I have already read and enjoyed many books by this author. If you enjoy Icelandic noir, I highly recommend this author. Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for the ARC to read and review.

A young man walks in the evening searching for poetic inspiration and stops on the bridge over the Pond in Reykjavik. He notices something unusual in the water: a doll, and he retrieves it. Then he sees a dead girl in the pond.

Twenty years later, a young woman is found dead, a syringe stuck in her arm: an accidental overdose, a suicide, or someone killed her?

It looks like these accidents are unrelated, but Konrad, a retired grumpy policeman, dutifully follows all the leads, and slowly a new picture emerges from his conversations with witnesses. These people often have been broken and disillusioned. Yet there is a need somewhere deep in their memories - or their hearts - to help explain the mysterious death of a young girl. Did she fall into the water? Or was a sinister murderer involved, an individual who didn't stop at anything to protect his reputation? Konrad becomes increasingly involved in both cases, and, at the same time, he tries to fight his demons.

"The Girl by the Bridge" is a thriller in the Scandinavian noir tradition, written by a renowned Icelandic crime fiction writer, Arnaldur Indriðason. His novels have been translated into many languages, and millions of copies have been sold. I'm not a newbie to Scandinavian noir mysteries, but I was struck by this book's particularly spare, dark style. At times, it was almost like reading a report or following a documentary or a movie script. However, there was always a melancholic mood below restrained, simple descriptions. The author purposefully avoids a judgmental or sympathetic tone, leaving the readers to experience the sad feeling permeating this Reykjavic mystery. Slowly, page by page, I was drawn deeper and deeper into the story, processing the layers of its plot.

It's no accident that the book starts with a poet finding the dead girl. There is strange, sad poetry in this novel - and Konrad is the new poet, this time the one who solves the mystery and, in a way, saves the girl's soul.

I liked this book, however, it is very evident that it is a translation work. There are a few sentences that don't quite flow correctly as the author was a native English speaker.

I think this book still has worth and I liked the cop and paranormal aspects being mixed together. I feel like the writing is along the lines of a Lisa Scottoline book.

It is with the greatest of regret that I have to dissent from most of the views expressed here.

I found the prose muddled and clunky, which made the narrative difficult and unpleasant to follow. The first job of a story teller is to make the language of his narrative welcoming and use it to draw people into his story. This prose had the opposite effect. It was an awful, wearing slog to stick with the story.

Was this translated from Icelandic? It certainly reads like a translation, and a really inept one.

I so enjoy all of Indridason's books! When a young woman goes missing, her grandparents reach out to Konrad, a former policeman, to help them They don't want the police involved as the girl has been mixing it up with bad company and is smuggling drugs. Konrad was excellent at his job and finally agrees to look into the matter. He has been thinking of his father's stabbing death lately and is working on a 20-year-old cold case about a young girl found dead in the river when her doll was found near the shore. We follow along with him as he weaves his way around the two separate stories and his father's murder. Wonderful story telling as always. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for my copy of The Girl by the Bridge.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for letting me read and review an advanced copy of this book.

Retired police detective Konrád is asked by a couple who knew his wife if he could try and find their missing grand daughter. He does not want to get involved, but reluctantly agrees. He still has close contacts at the police station that he uses to help with the search. At the same time, a former medium contacts Konrad about her contact with the spirit of a dead girl. At the time, he never expected the two would be related.

This story blends a dark past with the present in a way that forces Konrad to get more involved than he had hoped. At the same time, he also tries to get more information about his own past and his father, who had some shady dealings during WWII. For me, there was too much about drugs and child abuse, which were central themes in this book.

THE GIRL BY THE BRIDGE: A DETECTIVE KONRAD NOVEL by author Arnaldur Indridason is another in a series that feature the detective Konrad in Iceland, who while required to work on current cases also has his focus on a cold case involving a young girl’s drowning after a doll that possibly belonged to her led to the discovery of her body, although no progress took place after that leaving her long forgotten having occurred over twenty years ago, and he also decides to take on another case after being approached by the grandparents of a missing young woman, who seem to be genuinely concerned, but possibly more so due to an interest in avoiding negative publicity that could affect the grandfather who is a public figure.

Konrad is determined to make progress and possibly solve both cases, and becomes personally involved - even knowing that his life and career can become more difficult by getting too close to those involved in these cases.

Will he be successful in the drowning cold case with so little to work with in terms of possible witnesses or suspects? Somehow he has a suspicion that locating the missing doll is essential to helping solve the case in the absence of anything else to work with.

Has the young woman he’s been unable to locate disappeared of her own accord, or has she met with foul play as a result of bad choices made in her lifestyle and those she’s involved with?

Excellent story that is one of many novels by the author that I’ve read recently, one being another Konrad novel, and several others that include Inspector Erlendur, all of which I’d recommend highly.

Winter is in full swing here in MI where I reside, and reading these and other Iceland novels this season has given me a better feel for the conditions described in many of these books, now it’s time I get to work catching up on reviews for the majority of them before springtime arrives.

5 stars.

A poet searching for a perfect line noticed a doll floating beneath a bridge where he stood, but when he tried to retrieve it, he found something else: the body of a girl who apparently had fallen in and drowned. Years later, Konrad, a retired detective and sometimes private investigator, is contacted by a friend who has been seeing disturbing visions of the girl. Their fathers had been involved in a scam, setting up seances for desperate people who had lost loved ones, but she has a genuine gift. Konrad is skeptical of all things paranormal, but agrees to find out what he can about the long-ago investigation, conducted by a sloppy, incompetent cop and a medical examiner who lost records of the body. As he teases out tiny threads of information, he pulls on other mysteries concerning his father and associate. For another case, he's looking the teenage daughter of a retired politician; she turns up dead of an overdose - another seeming accident that has deeper dimensions.

I was disappointed in an earlier book in this series, partly because I missed Erlendur (protagonist of another series) and partly because Konrad seemed too gloomy and depressive to want to spend time with. But this was an excellent mystery. Not only is it brilliantly plotted, I found myself enjoying the dogged, tired kindness of the protagonist. Maybe I was just not in the mood before. In any case, I'm looking forward to future entries in this series.

Imagine if you will, your granddaugher is a drug smuggler, & she's gone rogue.
Now, imagine that 20 years earlier there was another crime of a young woman who was raped and drowned in a pond.
Her rapist was a sailor possibly a teen at the time.
The interwoven layers are finer than a wool mink coat.
Uncovering all the pieces of the puzzle incluiding a bizarre story centering around a doll and a house fire which left one man burnt to a crisp with hidden documents inside the doll is also on deck.
Swinging full circle we are brought to a physician who seems to have muddied the water a wee-bit which leads to further accusations and discoveries.
The retired cop Konrad clearly has his work cut out for him in this complex and diverse case.
Many different characters are presented with a fast moving plot involving more than just a coverup of a murder.
Oh, Gustaf ...what have you done?
Where is Danni? Could she have overdosed accidentally?
Or, did someone take her out for a reason>Silence is golden...Perhaps, but hang on tight as we're going for a spin!
Loved the entire novel!
Thank you to the King of Noir, St. Martin's Press, and Netgalley for this ARC in exchange for this honest review.

Arnaldur Indridason is a master of the slow burn mystery. The Girl by the Bridge is a welcomed addition to his Konráð series. Indridason skillfully builds his story around a mystery from the present day and a mystery from the past. Our dogged detective doesn't let retirement prevent him from peeling away the layers of both mysteries until only the truths remain. The convergence of the two storylines leads to an exquisite resolution at the end. The Girl by the Bridge is another riveting read by a master of the genre. Thank you to St. Martin's Press, Minotaur Books, and NetGalley for the advance reading copy in exchange for my honest opinion. #TheGirlByTheBridge

The Girl by the Bridge is book 2 in the Detective Konrad series by Arnaldur Indridason and it was such a fun read.
I've yet to read The Darkness Knows but after I'm done here I'm jumping onto Amazon and buying the first book in the set. Because this was a very good story.
I thought this was a well written, interesting plotted read.
This is the type of crime writing that grabs a hold of me pulls me deep into the mystery and thats exactly what Indridason did here.
With strong characters and even stronger story.
And a solid atmosphere. This book was unputdownable and had me pulling an all nighter.

I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own."

Thank You Netgalley and Minotaur Books for your generosity and gifting me a copy of this eARC!

I think that this is one of Arnaldur Indridason's best book so far. I've read them all and this one's a lot different than his usual book. He peaks your interest in that he has his characters near and dear to the police, the first one a retired cop and the second a cop who would like to retire. They are bothered by grandparents who are looking for their granddaughter. And then they are taken back by their fathers (deceased) to the of a drowning of a girl 20 years prior. As it turns out Arnaldur has complicated the matter with the deceased fathers being rather small time criminals and rather bad with children. If your interest hasn't peaked so far he brings in the into the mix séances and psychic abilities. This book is full of turns and red herrings to my delight. I think that you will be pleasantly surprised by how things turn out.

3.25/5 stars! The premise of this story was interesting. The multiple storylines were intricate and interesting. I did find the story to be hard to follow at times. I appreciated the beautiful setting of Reykjavik and the cultural aspects of the story. It was enjoyable but didn't stick out as especially special and I don't think I would read it again.

I received an advance review copy for free through NetGalley, and I am leaving this review voluntarily