Helgi Books in Order

The Helgi novels spin out of the same world as the Hulda books but shift the focus to Helgi Reykdal, a younger Reykjavík detective and criminology student who is obsessed with classic Golden Age mysteries.

In Death at the Sanatorium the story moves between 1983 and 2012. In the earlier timeline, nurse Yrsa is murdered at a former tuberculosis sanatorium in northern Iceland and the chief physician soon dies in a suspicious fall, leaving a handful of staff under a cloud of suspicion.

Decades later, Helgi is finishing his degree in Britain and offered a job at Reykjavík police headquarters—the same unit where Hulda is about to retire—while writing a thesis about the unsolved sanatorium case, and he decides to re‑interview the survivors.

As he digs into the old investigation, Helgi confronts evasive witnesses, institutional blind spots and his own complicated personal life, including a volatile relationship at home, all while trying to apply the fair‑play logic he loves in classic detective fiction.

The sequel, The Mysterious Case of the Missing Crime Writer, picks up after the events at the sanatorium, sending Helgi in search of a famous crime novelist who has vanished with barely a trace and weaving in a historic bank robbery and the unresolved mystery of Hulda’s disappearance.

These books are more overtly playful about their influences than Jónasson’s earlier series, full of nods to puzzle‑plot classics, but they still carry the hallmarks of his Icelandic noir: closed circles of suspects, long winters and crimes rooted in old wounds.

Readers who already know Ari Thór or Hulda will spot cross‑connections, while newcomers can treat Helgi’s stories as self‑contained mysteries with modern stakes and a distinctly retro heartbeat.