The Killer’s Guide to Iceland

The main character in this novel is a Scottish dot-com entrepreneur who sells his company and moves to Iceland to live with an Icelandic geologist he meets by chance in Glasgow. She doesn’t know that he is still haunted by memories of his former girlfriend and business partner. But she too turns out to have a more interesting past than he bargained for. Despite its implausible plot, stereotyped characters, sometimes clumsy dialogue, and misspelled Icelandic, why did I actually enjoy reading The Killer’s Guide and not want my time back? I think it was because of the pleasure of seeing the Reykjavík I know on the pages of a cheesy British novel. Radcliffe did his homework and much of the description of Iceland reads quite true to life. And, having been once new in Iceland myself, it feels a bit flattering to see the experience of newly arrived foreigners here given book-length treatment. Still, I wish I had a hundred crowns per “Heimæy,” “Bírna” and every other misspelled word in the book, and anyone who actually lives here will find some of the story details a bit too much to swallow.