Ragnar Jónasson, the author of the bestselling Dark Iceland series, set in and around Siglufjörður, and featuring Detective Ari Thór, returns with a standalone thriller that has an attention-grabbing concept behind it. Una, a young woman just short of thirty, has never come to grips with her father’s premature death. After showing promise as a medical student, Una decided she didn’t want to be a doctor after all and instead became a teacher. But she cannot secure employment offering more than a pay slip to pay slip existence, and she cannot face another winter staring at the four walls of her shabby Reykjavík apartment.

When Una’s closest friend, Sara, shows her an advertisement in the local paper for a teaching position in the tiny, isolated fishing village of Skálar, Una thinks the position might offer a chance for her to make a fresh start and get her life back on track. She applies for the job and gets hired almost immediately. Sure, she reasons, Skálar is a remote hamlet with a population of only ten souls, far from Reykjavík and almost at the end of the world on the Langanes Peninsula. But the teaching contract is only for the winter. If things don’t turn out to her liking, she can always return home. What could possibly go wrong?

Feeling hopeful, Una embarks on the long drive to Skálar. But the closer she gets to the village, the more remote it seems. When she finally arrives, feeling a sense of foreboding and with her old car seemingly on its last legs, Una doubts the wisdom of her decision. Still, Salka, the woman who hired her seems welcoming. She is the mother of one of Una’s new students, a class comprising only two girls. Salka provides Una’s accommodations, an attic flat in her home, which seems adequate.

It doesn’t take long before Una realizes the other inhabitants of Skálar aren’t nearly as welcoming as Salka. She finds the hamlet a close knit community that seems distrustful of outsiders. Strange occurrences begin in the attic of the house. A sudden tragedy echoes an incident from the village’s distant past. The villagers become even more guarded and less accepting of Una. Eventually, she discovers why. The people of Skálar share some awful secrets.

From the start, The Girl Who Died seems almost cinematic. So, it didn’t surprise me when the book brought to mind an old 1955 American crime thriller film, Bad Day at Black Rock, directed by John Sturges and starring Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan. The premises of the film and Jónasson’s novel are similar. A stranger comes to a tiny town that possesses a terrible past the inhabitants want to keep secret, by any means necessary. The Girl Who Died also has something of a Stephen King feel to it.

I’ve been a fan of Ragnar Jónasson since reading Snowblind, the first book in the Dark Iceland series. The Girl Who Died showcases the same brilliant writing style as found in the Ari Thór novels. In this book, Jónasson introduces us to most of the characters on a first name only basis, which curiously seems to make our interactions with them even more intimate than if we knew their surnames. I particularly liked that aspect.

Jónasson also gives us a bit of added insight by putting us into the heads of two additional narrators.