Breakaway Books

Authored by Ragnar Jonasson; Published August 2024; Mystery

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️

Death at the Sanatorium was crafted in the legacy of Agatha Christie, and there are reminders of that everywhere. Homage after homage to great mystery writers fill the book—and it is a worthy successor to these classics.

Death at the Sanatorium follows Helgi, an Icelandic student recently returned from studying criminology in England, as he pursues his thesis on an unsolved case at the eponymous sanatorium and is unexpectedly pulled into a quite recent murder. Most of the key players in the cold case have moved from the small-town scene of the murder to the larger, more cosmopolitan Reykjavik—but they can’t escape the crime so easily. Compared to some of the mysteries I’ve read of late, this novel is simple, sparing in its language: a classic whodunit that could be called elegant.

Still, the novel is composed of multiple timelines and perspectives. With every chapter, the reader sees the cold case with a slightly different bias—not all of them likable or relatable, but all of them realistic in their ordinary-ness. There aren’t really graphic descriptions of violence or life-threatening situations: honestly, it mostly seemed civilized for a murder investigation. The downside, of course, is it meant fewer heart-pounding moments for the reader; this mystery is really about the puzzle more than the suspense.

From the jump, I didn’t quite trust Helgi, and it seems that the novel was intended that way—for the reader to be constantly questioning the reliability of the narrator. As events unfold, we learn more about his personal circumstances, and I can’t say he felt all that much more reliable at the novel’s end, but I was far more sympathetic to him. I hope this is only the first of a series, because it certainly felt like he left those of us interested in his life in the lurch.

If you like the classic whodunits, I’m sure you’ll enjoy Death at the Sanatorium.