Far North

The 2008 financial meltdown sets the backdrop for Ridpath’s impressive second crime thriller featuring Magnus Jonson, a Boston police detective who moved from Iceland with his father to the U.S. at age 12 and has been recently seconded to the Icelandic police force (after 2011’s Where the Shadows Lie). After participating in a protest in 2009 as part of the so-called pots-and-pans revolution, unemployed banker Harpa Einarsdóttir accidentally kills her former boss, Gabríel Örn. Eight months later, another leading figure in Icelandic banking, Óskar Gunnarsson, who was suspected of fraud, is shot to death during a visit to London. Magnus, assigned to the second case, soon wonders about a link between the two deaths. Meanwhile, he remains haunted by the unsolved murder of his father, Ragnar, stabbed in the back in Duxbury, Mass., when Magnus was 20. The significance of the flashback sequences beginning in 1934 isn’t immediately clear, but Ridpath skillfully weaves them into the story. Agent: Oliver Munson, Blake Friedmann Literary Agency. (Aug.)