The Body in the Bath (November 2026) - Ragnar Jónasson

 

I've read some of Ragnar Jónasson's work in the past, and was particularly taken by his Hulda series featuring a 64-year-old Icelandic female detective facing imminent forced retirement. That series is particularly well crafted in the way that it delivers an early gut punch to the reader before recounting Hulda's entire story in reverse chronological order. The first three books in the series (along with U.S. publication dates) are: The Darkness (2018), The Island (2019), and The Mist (2019). A fourth book in the series, Hulda, was published in 2024 but is not yet available in an English translation, although French language readers have recently been treated to the French edition. 

The good news for Hulda fans is that Hulda and her past play prominent roles in the third book in Jónasson's Helgi Reykdal series, the soon-to-be-published The Body in the Bath. Helgi Reykdal is the young detective for whom Hulda was pushed out of the Reykjavik police department at age sixty-four. While never having met her personally, Helgi is aware of his connection to Hulda and uses that attachment as a distraction from his own troubles with the department. Please note that despite not having read the first two books in this series, I was pleased see how well The Body in the Bath works as a standalone crime novel. 

As the novel opens, Helgi has just recently returned to work after grieving the death of his girlfriend Anita in a car accident for a month. His superiors would have preferred that Helgi not come back so soon, but realizing how dazed and angry Helgi still is, they allow him to work some old case files at his own pace. Helgi has good reason to be angry: the driver who struck Anita is none other than his old girlfriend Bergpóra, a violent alcoholic who was often physically abusive to Helgi during the course of their relationship. Helgi is convinced that Anita's death was no accident, and he is determined to prove it.

But then Bergpóra is found dead in her own bath tub, and Helgi is the prime, if not the only, suspect in her murder. Now he is struggling to convince his fellow cops that he is innocent - but that will not be easy.

Note - I suspect that anyone reading The Body in the Bath will want to at least take a look  at the first two books in the series: Death at the Sanatorium (2024) and The Mysterious Case of the Missing Crime Writer (2025).

Will Reading Fewer Books at a Time Mean Greater Retention?

 

My daily routine has been so different these last few weeks that I've slipped into, what is for me, an unusual reading pattern. I have been forced to squeeze in reading time wherever I can find it, and reading in short bursts has considerably lessened my retention rate. That means that reading in and out of eight or nine books at a time is out of the question right now, and I'm down to reading one physical book and one e-book instead. And surprisingly enough, I'm enjoying the change.

But still, I'm way behind on reviewing the handful of books that I've finished in the last month or so, and I'm not sure how that is ultimately going to work out. I suspect my reviews will be shorter than they've tended to be in the last year, but I want to write them anyway, even if just as an self-exercise to help me remember as much about the books as possible.

Finished but not yet reviewed are: 

• Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth,
• Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne,
• Eifelheim by Michael Flynn,
• The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail,
• Crows by Charles Dickinson, and
• The Body in the Bath by Ragnar Jónasson.

Honestly, it's going to be a push to get those all written, but my intentions are good...at least for now.

I just finished The Body in the Bath this afternoon, an ARC that will be published in November. Those of you who enjoyed Jónasson's Hulda series a while back when several of us were reading it, will want to get your hands on this one as soon as you can. The three Hulda books comprise one of my favorite crime series ever, and it was really fun to watch Hulda's successor start to nose around in what may have happened to her right before she was scheduled to resign her detective position with the Reykjavik police department. The Body in the Bath is actually the third book in Jónasson's Helgi Reykdal series - but it works well as a standalone for those of us who have not read the first two books yet.

I hadn't been to the library since June, but managed to drop by this morning to see if something would catch my eye. The Radiant Dark did just that, and that's the physical book I'll be reading for the next few days. From the book flap: "It's March 1980, and Carol Gerrard and her husband are living an ordinary life in a small town in the Adirondacks. They have just had their first child, and though Carol is struggling with the challenges of motherhood, her future seems clear. Until something extraordinary happens: an inexplicable flickering of light in the sky, which is ultimately determined to be communication from intelligent life on another planet. But these beings are eleven light-years away, and nothing is known about them other than the fact that they seem to know we exist too. And so begins a decades-long exchange of messages with this mysterious, faraway civilization." The Radiant Dark was published in April 2026 and weighs in at 412 pages. I have high hopes for it. 

The e-book I'll be concentrating on is Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. I decided to make this one my first attempt at reading something for my 1926 project. I'm still hoping to read at least three or four from 1926, but this one has gotten off to a bit of a rough start with me. The set-up is taking a long time, but I've read so many good things about it, that I'm going to read on until the plot finally arrives in the present day. It's the story of a middle-aged spinster forced to move out of the family home by her brother. And there she makes a pact with the devil and discovers that her true calling is witchcraft. I think it's an early feminist novel that uses satire to make its point.

I think this less distracting pace is just what I need right now if I'm going to be able to remember anything about my reading...now I just need to find the time to read and write a little. I hope you all are doing well out there. It's so hot and humid in Houston that we are all keeping our heads down as much as we can. Theoretically, that means more reading time. We'll have to see about that.