Jar City

Jar City, published in Icelandic in 2000 under the title Mýrin, meaning The Bog, is a crime novel by the Icelandic writer Arnaldur Indriðason and the third installment in his Detective Erlendur series, though the first to appear in English translation, in 2004. The novel follows Detective Erlendur investigating the murder of an elderly man in Reykjavik, an inquiry that leads back through Iceland's genetic research industry and its national DNA database, raising questions about hereditary disease, buried family secrets and the uneasy relationship between scientific progress and personal privacy. Indriðason's use of the case to probe contemporary Icelandic anxieties about genetic research, alongside his portrayal of Erlendur's own bleak personal life, helped establish the internationally successful Nordic noir style of crime fiction and made Jar City one of its most widely translated founding works.