Summary: 1983. At a small healthcare facility located in a former TB sanatorium in northern Iceland, a nurse enters the offices in the early morning ready to start the day. She finds the head nurse Yrsa dead at her desk, gruesomely murdered. A week later the administrator plummets to his death from a balcony. The case is neatly wrapped up as a murder and a suicide. 2012. A police officer named Helgi is finishing his criminology dissertation on the old crimes at the sanatorium. In the course of doing his research and talking to those who worked at the sanatorium during the 1980s, he stirs up alarm and suspicion.

Thoughts: It is appropriate that the investigator in this novel, Helgi, is a fan of Agatha Christie novels since it is written much in the Christie style. Christie was fond of the expression “old sins cast long shadows” and this is certainly applicable to Death at the Sanatorium, which flits back and forth in time from 1951 to 1983 to 2012. The abandoned sanatorium adds greatly to the ghostly atmosphere as few things are as eerie as an empty and abandoned hospital. This was a quick read and felt more like a novella than a full-length novel.

If you are a fan of British mystery writers like Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie, then you will enjoy this snappy little tribute to golden age mysteries. It ends with a cliff-hanger, indicating that more fun mysteries are in the works.