The Konrad Simonsen series has been percolating for a while in the native Denmark of sibling authors Lotte and Søren Hammer, where six of the books have been published thus far. Readers in the United States were introduced to this intriguing series in 2013 with THE HANGING, which welcomed Detective Chief Superintendent Konrad Simonsen and his extremely quirky team to these shores. The second installment, THE GIRL IN THE ICE, has just been published (thanks in large part to Paul Norlen’s translation). Despite a couple of faults, it will cause you to put this series on your must-read list if it isn’t there already.

The book begins with a grim tableau, that of a young woman who has been frozen in the ice of Greenland for 25 years before her trussed, half-naked body is discovered. Simonsen and his team are called in, and he is immediately distressed. He recalls that he had investigated a very similar murder of another young lady 20 years ago. The investigation ended badly, particularly because it now appears that the team he led had honed in on the wrong man as a suspect.

"[T]he characters, particularly the physically damaged and emotionally fragile Simonsen, are worth staying for and anticipating future installments of the series, which hopefully we will see sooner rather than later."

It is now up to Simonsen --- whose health appears to be increasingly frail --- and his team of somewhat disparate personalities to determine the identity of the real murderer of both women. Interestingly enough, they are able to do so in relatively short order. It takes just a bit of time to locate the fiend, who has been more or less in plain view, and perhaps continuing to murder, in and around Copenhagen and beyond. However, finding him and actually proving that he killed anyone are two different things.

The investigation also gets sidetracked occasionally on interesting but unrelated matters, so that the investigators --- not to mention the reader --- must focus on the primary purpose of the investigation, which is to obtain justice for the victims, as well as identifying others who may be victims. The murderer is, to say the least, as cunning an individual as you are likely to encounter and is all the more chilling for it. As the tale winds to a conclusion, the question that is subtly presented is if Simonsen, with all of his difficulties, is up to the challenge of catching him, even as the stakes suddenly rise astronomically.

Once in a while, the narrative suffers from what I call “missed sprocket syndrome” after what would occur in old-timey reel-to-reel movies. At times the video would go herky-jerky, skipping a couple of seconds or so and causing a distraction. This happens occassionally here, and I’m wondering if it was due to a manuscript problem, such as editing, or if the questions raised by certain omissions will be resolved in a future volume. The narrative’s point of view also jumps around a bit; while this is not a bad thing in itself, sometimes the transition is such that it gives up the game and spoils the suspense that had been building.

Still, the characters, particularly the physically damaged and emotionally fragile Simonsen, are worth staying for and anticipating future installments of the series, which hopefully we will see sooner rather than later.