Vintage books Reykjavik Nights Indridason Arnaldur

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

An old man is found murdered in his Reykjavik flat • A cryptic note and a photograph of a young girl's grave are left behind • Did the dead man's past come back to haunt him? • Inspector Erlendur discovers that several decades ago the victim was accused, but not convicted, of an unsolved crime. As he follows a fascinating trail of strange forensic evidence, Inspector Erlendur uncovers secrets that are much larger than the murder of one man - dark secrets that have been carefully guarded for many, many years • 'A fascinating window on an unfamiliar world as well as an original and puzzling mystery' Val McDermid

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

Max Glickman is son to an atheist boxer, Jack 'The Jew' Glickman, and a glamorous card-playing mother. Growing up in the peace and security of the 1950s Manchester suburbs, the word 'extermination' haunts his vocabulary and Nazis lurk in his imagination • When his childhood friend Manny is released from prison, the tug of religion and history proves too strong to be ignored and Max must accept there is no refuge from the dead

Reykjavik, Saturday night • He offered her another margarita, and, as he returned from the bar, he carefully slid the pill into her glass. They were getting along fine, and he was sure she would give him no trouble • 48 hours later • A young man is found dead in a pool of blood. There is no sign of a break-in at his flat. The victim is found wearing a woman's t-shirt, while a bottle of Rohypnol lies on the table nearby • Detective Elinborg, already struggling to juggle family life and the relentless demands of her job, is assigned the case. But with no immediate leads to the killer, can she piece together details of the victim's secret life and solve a brutal murder?

The crime: Reykjavik, August 1941. When a travelling salesman is found murdered in a basement flat, the police initially suspect a member of the Allied occupation force • The suspect: Flovent, Reykjavik’s sole detective, is joined by the young military policeman Thorson. Their investigation focuses on a family of German residents, the retired doctor Rudolf Lunden and his estranged son Felix, who is on the run, suspected of being a spy • The ex-lover: Flovent and Thorson race to solve the case before US Counterintelligence can take it out of their hands. As evidence emerges of dubious experiments carried out on Icelandic schoolboys in the 1930s, Thorson becomes increasingly suspicious of the role played by the murdered man’s former girlfriend, Vera, and her British soldier lover

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

Creepy. Peculiar. Fairy. Goblin. Liar. Weirdo. Crank. Genius • No one knows what to make of Juliet Slater, not even her mother. And clothes, boys, school, friends, the changing seasons and what other people think - none of these things seem to matter to Juliet. She spends hours in her room with incomprehensible mathematical text books, her mind voyaging in strange seas of thought, alone. Is she a genius? It might take the rest of her life to find out • While Stella Gibbons was celebrated for her beloved bestseller Cold Comfort Farm, the manuscript for Pure Juliet lay unseen and forgotten until it was brought to light by her family in 2014, and is published here for the first time in Vintage Classics. A tale that travels from an eco-millionaire's British country idyll to an Arabian Nights-style fantasy of the Middle East, this is a treat for fans of this witty, curious and always surprising author

Abandoned as a baby, Alfgrimur is content to spend his days as a fisherman living in the turf cottage outside Reykjavik with the elderly couple he calls grandmother and grandfather. There he shares the mid-loft with a motley bunch of eccentrics and philosophers who find refuge in the simple respect for their fellow men that is the ethos at the Brekkukot. But the narrow horizons of Alfgrimur's idyllic childhood are challenged when he starts school and meets Iceland's most famous singer, the mysterious Garoar Holm. Garoar encourages him to aim for the 'one true note', but how can he attain it without leaving behind the world that he loves?