Vintage books Jar City Indridason Arnaldur

The Living • Erlendur has recently joined the police force as a young officer and immediately sinks into the darkness of Reykjavik's underworld. Working nights, he discovers the city is full of car crashes, robberies, drinkers and fighters. And sometimes an unexplained death • The Lost • A homeless man Erlendur knows is found drowned. But few people care. Or when a young woman on her way home from a club vanishes. Both cases go cold • The Searcher • Two lost people from two different worlds. Erlendur is not an investigator, but his instincts tell him their fates are worth pursuing. How could they be linked? • In the Heart of the Night • Inexorably, he is drawn into the blackness of the city's underbelly, where everyone is in the dark or on the run

Detective Sigurdur Oli is in trouble • After a school reunion exposes the chasm between his life and those of his much more successful contemporaries, leaving him bitter and resentful, one of his old friends asks him to pay an unofficial visit to a couple of blackmailers. He readily agrees, only to arrive to find one of the pair lying in a pool of blood. When the victim dies in hospital, Sigurdur Oli is faced with investigating a murder without revealing his own reasons for being present at the murder scene • Moving from the villas of Reykjavik's banking elite to a sordid basement flat, Black Skies is a superb story of greed, pride and murder from one of Europe's most successful crime writers

A dark-skinned young boy is found dead, frozen to the ground in a pool of his own blood. The boy's Thai half-brother is missing; is he implicated, or simply afraid for his own life? While fears increase that the murder could have been racially motivated, the police receive reports that a suspected paedophile has been spotted in the area • Detective Erlendur's investigation soon unearths the tension simmering beneath the surface of Iceland's outwardly liberal, multi-cultural society while the murder forces Erlendur to confront the tragedy in his own past

1945: a lost German bomber crashes on the Vatnajцkull glacier in Iceland • Inexplicably, in the midst of World War Two, there are both German and American officers on board. One of the senior German officers sets off, a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, never to be seen again • 1999, the US Army is secretively trying to remove an aeroplane from the Vatnajцkull glacier • Two young Icelanders become involved but end up paying with their lives. Before they are captured, one of the two contacts his sister, Kristin. Her quest to discover his fate takes her on a long and hazardous journey in search of the key to the riddle about Operation Napoleon

A missing woman. A missing boy. Detective Erlendur returns - for the last time • A young woman walks into the frozen fjords of Iceland, never to be seen again. But Matthildur leaves in her wake rumours of lies, betrayal and revenge • Decades later, somewhere in the same wilderness, Detective Erlendur is on the hunt. He is looking for Matthildur but also for a long-lost brother, whose disappearance in a snow-storm when they were children has coloured his entire life. He is looking for answers • Slowly, the past begins to surrender its secrets. But as Erlendur uncovers a story about the limits of human endurance, he realises that many people would prefer their crimes to stay buried

'Marvellous entertainment' Sunday Times • Just married and newly arrived in Los Angeles are Paul and Katherine Cattleman. Paul responds immediately to the sunny, sprawling cosmopolitan city but to Katherine the main impression is of dirt and smog. Paul explores his surroundings and discovers Ceci, a girl who could be the incarnation of the city's uninhibited ways, while Katherine meets Iz a psychiatrist who recognises her unhappiness and sets out to help her. Under the bright west coast sun, the city begins to affect the couple in separate, subtle but significant ways, shining new light on their marriage with moving, funny and unexpected consequences

One of the first things I was told when I arrived in Kabul was never to walk • When journalist Taran Khan arrives in Kabul, she uncovers a place that defies her expectations. Her wanderings with other Kabulis reveal a fragile city in a state of flux: stricken by near-constant war, but flickering with the promise of peace; governed by age-old codes but experimenting with new modes of living • Her walks take her to the unvisited tombs of the dead, and to the land of the living - like the booksellers, archaeologists, film-makers and entrepreneurs who are remaking this 3,000-year-old city. And as NATO troops begin to withdraw from the country, Khan watches the cycle of transformation begin again

Through a series of mishaps, Henry Warren, a recently divorced City financier, ends up in hospital in a Northern town ruined by the closure of its shipyard. Moved by the fate of the town's inhabitants, Warren risks his fortune and reputation to save the shipyard and restore the town to its former prosperity. In seeking to change the fate of the town, he radically changes his own

Building work in an expanding Reykjavik uncovers a shallow grave • Years before, this part of the city was all open hills, and Erlendur and his team hope this is a typical Icelandic missing person scenario; perhaps someone once lost in the snow, who has lain peacefully buried for decades. Things are never that simple • Whilst Erlendur struggles to hold together the crumbling fragments of his own family, his case unearths many other tales of family pain. The hills have more than one tragic story to tell: tales of failed relationships and heartbreak; of anger, domestic violence and fear; of family loyalty and family shame. Few people are still alive who can tell the story, but even secrets taken to the grave cannot remain hidden forever

One cold autumn night, a woman is found hanging from a beam at her holiday cottage. At first sight, it appears like a straightforward case of suicide; Maria had never recovered from the death of her mother two years previously and she had a history of depression. But then the friend who found her body approaches Detective Erlendur with a tape of a seance that Maria attended before her death and his curiosity is aroused • Driven by a need to find answers, Erlendur begins an unofficial investigation into Maria's death. But he is also haunted by another unsolved mystery - the disappearance of two young people thirty years ago - and by his own quest to find the body of his brother, who died in a blizzard when he was a boy. Hypothermia is Indridason's most compelling novel yet

The once-great city of Bohane on the west coast of Ireland is on its knees, infested by vice and split along tribal lines. There are still some posh parts of town, but it is in the slums and backstreets of Smoketown, the tower blocks of the Northside Rises and the eerie bogs of Big Nothin' that the city really lives • For years, Bohane has been in the cool grip of Logan Hartnett, the dapper godfather of the Hartnett Fancy gang. But there's trouble in the air. But now they say his old nemesis is back in town; his trusted henchmen are getting ambitious; and there's trouble in the air

A delightful journey through time and through the streets of one of the greatest cultural capitals in Europe • A magnet for trade and travellers from all over the world, stylish, cosmopolitan Amsterdam is a city of dreams and nightmares, of grand civic architecture and legendary beauty, but also of civil wars, bloody religious purges, and the tragedy of Anne Frank • In this fascinating examination of the city's soul, part history, part travel guide, Geert Mak imaginatively recreates the lives of the early Amsterdammers, and traces Amsterdam's progress from waterlogged settlement to a major financial centre and thriving modern metropolis