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).