Hidden Iceland Books in Order

The Hidden Iceland trilogy follows Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir of the Reykjavík police, but tells her story in reverse, beginning at the end of her career and then stepping back through earlier cases to show how past losses shaped the woman she becomes.

In The Darkness Hulda is sixty‑four and being pushed into early retirement. Given two weeks to work one last cold case, she chooses the file of a young Russian asylum seeker whose body was found on a remote shore and quickly written off as suicide.

As she digs, Hulda discovers that another immigrant woman vanished around the same time and that colleagues may have looked the other way, forcing her to confront prejudice, bureaucratic indifference and the limits of her own authority.

The next book, The Island, moves back a decade to a summer when four friends hold a reunion on the isolated island of Elliðaey; when one of them falls from a cliff, Hulda is called north and soon links the death to an older killing in the Westfjords and to the lingering impact of her daughter’s suicide.

The Mist goes further back to the late 1980s, trapping readers with Hulda inside an isolated farmhouse during a brutal snowstorm, where a desperate stranger arrives at the door and events spiral toward a crime that will haunt her for decades.

Together the three novels form an unconventional arc: each mystery stands on its own, but read in order they reveal how grief, ambition, motherhood and institutional pressures have shaped Hulda’s choices, all against a backdrop of glaciers, highland roads and remote farms.

The character has now moved beyond the page into a television adaptation of The Darkness, yet the books remain the best place to experience her sharp mind, stubborn sense of justice and the quiet fury she carries into every investigation.