English Translations of Scandinavian/Nordic Mysteries & Thrillers discussion

For the month of August 2026 we have 3 books so far, we will add books as they become known to us. Good reading.

1) Freyja by Margrét Ann Thors to be published on the 4th of August 2026. Iceland. 304 pages.

The unsolved case of a young girl’s disappearance reopens after twenty years in this moody, atmospheric debut of suspense set in Reykjavík and the Icelandic coast.

Unnur has secrets. A single mother to a beloved daughter, Lilja, she lives a deliberately quiet life in Reykjavík, working at a bakery under an assumed last name and pushing away haunting visions of the last summer of her childhood. Her safety—and Lilja’s—now hinges on discretion. But when her ex-husband returns to Iceland and brings with him a new girlfriend, who seems to know more about Unnur than she’s letting on, Unnur may finally have to face what happened long ago on a black sand beach in the remote Dark Valley—and the possibility that she might be responsible for the disappearance of her otherworldly friend Freyja.

As a cold case investigation reopens and the intricate threads of past and present begin to tangle, Unnur must race to recover the broken memory of what happened all those years ago, or risk losing her daughter. Steeped in Icelandic folklore and myth, Freyja is at once a gripping story of a child’s disappearance, a testament to the power of a mother’s love, and an enthralling tale of redemption and forgiveness from a gifted new voice.

2) Post Mortem: A Mystery by David Lagercrantz to be published on the 25th of August 2026. Sweden. 352 pages.

From the bestselling writer of The Girl in the Spider's Web comes another mystery led by detective duo Rekke and this time, their hunt for a serial killer has a literary twist.

It’s 1988. Dag and his friend Pompe are on a road trip through Europe. As they speed through French towns and Basque villages in Dag’s red BMW convertible, they party and discuss Celine, Hemingway, and Leonard Cohen. But when Pompe's drinking gets more intense, a darker side emerges. In the Spanish port city of Santander, Pompe and Dag meet a young waitress, Sandra. She has dreams of becoming a writer and is smitten by the two intellectual Scandinavians, especially Pompe, who represents the literary lifestyle she longs for. Before Dag goes home to Sweden, he decides to tell Sandra what Pompe might be capable of...

Now it's November 2008, back in Stockholm. We’re reintroduced to Professor Hans Rekke and his detective partner Micaela Vargas, who has a new boyfriend she hasn't yet told Rekke about. They receive a surprise visit from a Spanish police chief inspector who is haunted by the unsolved, brutal murder of a young woman in Santander in the late ‘80s, and believes this case is connected to others. Could there be a serial killer on the loose, who leaves numerical codes on the bodies of his victims? Can Rekke help decipher these signs before the killer strikes again?

Post Mortem switches between these two timelines, taking us into the last day of Sandra’s life, and Rekke and Vargas’s search for clues, which lead them by turns to an egomaniac writer, a widely loathed literary agent, and ultimately to Sandra's posthumously published short story. In yet another intricate and exciting puzzle mystery, David Lagercrantz draws on the literary world that he—and we—know all too well to tell a story about guilt, shame, repressed memories, human depravity, and publishing.

3) Snow Kissed: A Frida Skardet Scandi Noir Thriller by Tom Quiller to be published on the 28th of August 2026. Scandinavia.

The next book in the Amazon #1 Bestselling Series of Scandi Noir thrillers featuring Detective Frida Skardet from the author of the Cold Secrets series, Tom Quiller. Pre-book this title now before the price changes.

A GLACIER RETREATS EXPOSING LONG DEAD SECRETS
When a retreating glacier reveals human remains, Frida is pulled into a cold case that has haunted a remote community for decades. Old secrets, buried betrayals, and long-suppressed crimes surface as she digs into the past. The case becomes a mirror for her own buried grief, showing how communities, like people, can be scarred by silence and survival...

4) The Woodsman: A short story from the wilds of Canada by Christoffer Petersen to be published on the 28th of August 2026. Canada. 33 pages.

Grieving for his dead father, killed in the forest, a woodsman finds salvation in the restoration of a classic chainsaw.

Packed with action, emotion, and a little profanity, The Woodsman is a short story set in a fictive Yukon territory, inspired by the author’s months-long expedition on the Yukon River.

5) The Wolf at the Gallows: A Historical Folk Horror Mystery by Eira Norlund to be published on the 4th of August 2026. Sweden. 225 pages.

Sweden, Småland, 1557. When a crown officer is found dead in the snow, the villagers say a wolf took him. Karin, a hunter and tracker, sees something else in the trail he left behind: signs of violence, fear, and a lie the village would rather keep buried.

As winter closes in, Karin follows the tracks from the gallows hill into a community still scarred by rebellion, grief, and old loyalties. Each answer exposes another silence—and brings her closer to a truth powerful men have killed to protect.

To uncover what happened, Karin must decide whom to trust, what the village owes its dead, and how much justice can survive when everyone has something to lose.

The Wolf at the Gallows is an atmospheric historical murder mystery steeped in winter dread, folk belief, and the long afterlife of guilt.

6) The Herring Fjord by Marcella Nardi to be published on the 14th of August 2026. Iceland. 186 pages.

For Nordic Noir lovers

Iceland 2025 - In the frozen heart of Fjallabyggð, among wind-swept fjords, snow-covered mountains, and colorful houses, the past refuses to stay buried.

When a woman is found dead in the "Herring Museum," the quiet Icelandic town finds itself in the grip of ancient silences and unatoned sins. The scene that greets the two police officers is disturbing, almost ritualistic: one of the victim's hands is immersed in ice with a red handkerchief between her fingers.

Commissioner Erla Kristjánsdóttir and her deputy Jonas Sveinsson plunge into an investigation that reopens wounds that never healed: missing women, censored letters, sins buried beneath the snow, and a forgotten treasure hidden within the walls of the past.

Among storms, dusty archives, and stifled confessions, the truth makes its way beneath the frozen surface of a community that fears the judgment of memory.
But every winter, even the hardest ice cracks.

An immersive Nordic thriller where suspense intertwines with emotional depth, and where those who dare rewrite history... risk paying with their lives.

7) THE ICELANDIC GIRL by Judith Lavis to be published on the 11th of August 2026. Iceland. 211 pages.

Tricia, by pure luck, has narrowly escaped death at the hands of a serial killer while on holiday in Iceland.
With the help of Kristjan, an Icelandic Ranger who finds her half buried in the snow, she sets out to stop him
and take revenge.

She places herself in great danger but finds a special love on the journey.

This is the last case for Detective Inspector Reed before he retires. Aided by a psychic medium, he has
the task of bringing the killer to justice before he can strike again.

8) AMBER INITIATIVE - THE REYKJAVIK LINE: Book Two of The Kestrel Files by Jonathan Snowden and J5 Ai Intelligence to be published on the 11th of August 2026. Iceland. 50 pages.

Maya Cole was supposed to disappear after Geneva. New name, new city, a promise to herself that she was done reading between the lines of other people's paperwork.

Then a coded weather report — the kind fishing trawlers file by the thousand — surfaces off the coast of Iceland, and buried inside it is a phrase only her mother ever used. Not a memory this time. A message, timestamped six days ago.
Someone who died twenty-two years ago is still filing reports. Or someone wants Maya to believe that badly enough to lure her back into the open.

What she finds in Reykjavik is a second thread of the Amber Initiative — one the four founding services never spoke of to each other, let alone wrote down. A line that was never meant to be crossed twice.
The eye still doesn't sleep. This time, it's watching from closer than Maya thinks.

Book Three follows.

9) The Viking Seal by Marcella Nardi to be published on the 15th of August 2026. Iceland. 144 pages.

An ancient symbol. A meticulously planned murder. A truth buried for centuries beneath Iceland's ice.

When young historian Harald Guntlieb is found murdered in the archives of Reykjavík University's Department of Medieval Studies, everything points to a disturbing ritual killing. Two ancient coins placed on his eyes, a mysterious runic symbol carved into his body, and the disappearance of a precious artifact all seem to invoke dark Viking legends.
Attorney Thora Guðmundsdóttir, brilliant, curious, and gifted with extraordinary powers of observation, finds herself drawn into an investigation that will take her through secret libraries, archaeological finds, ancient manuscripts, and Iceland's breathtaking landscapes.
At her side is Matthew Reich, a refined German restorer and art expert, with whom she must distinguish truth from historical forgeries, legend from fact, and greed from the passion for knowledge.

Among ancient seals, runes, lost treasures, and academic rivalries, each discovery seems to open a door to a past that someone is willing to protect... even if it means killing again.

The Viking Seal is an original blend of Cozy Mystery and Nordic Noir: an intelligent investigation, rich in atmosphere, set in evocative Iceland, where the allure of Viking civilization meets the pace of a modern mystery, complete with suspense, plot twists, and unforgettable characters.

For readers who love historical mysteries, Nordic legends, and thrillers set in Northern Europe's most captivating landscapes.

Last Known: An Iceland Search-and-Rescue Thriller by Clay Carver to be published on the 27th of August 2026. Iceland. 329 pages.

Nine people nearly froze to death. Every one was found beside an unopened bottle of water.

Cole Rourke arrives in Iceland's Westfjords to deliver a file to a woman who has every right to refuse it.

On the way, he finds something else.

A stone wall on a remote hillside. Too thick for shelter. Built to a design that should exist only in a rescue report from a mountain in Chile.

Then local rescue coordinator Hrefna Karlsdóttir shows him nine call-outs.

Every casualty was fit. Every location was reported with impossible precision. And every rescue was a little harder than the one before it.

Farther from the road. Older last-known positions. More volunteers. More vehicles. More aircraft.

Someone isn't studying the people who get lost.

They're measuring the people who come to find them.

Every rescue leaves a record—routes, response times, search patterns, capability. Put enough true reports together and a stranger can know exactly what a rescue team will do when the next call comes.

And what will be left unguarded while they do it.

Cole has spent years fighting people who hide behind lies. In Iceland, he discovers something harder to beat: a system built from accurate records, honest professionals, and people doing exactly the right thing.

Because the enemy doesn't need to watch you if they can read what you wrote down.

LAST KNOWN is Book Seven in the Cole Rourke thriller series. It can be read as a standalone, but the larger story is best experienced in order.

11) The House at Hrafnvík by Apple Ram to be published on the 16th of August 2026. Iceland. 171 pages.

A missing boy. A silent village. A game that never ended.

When architect Elín Sæmundsdóttir inherits a shuttered children's home on a remote Icelandic fjord, she brings her husband and their newly adopted seven-year-old son, Ari, to spend the summer turning it into a guesthouse. It should be simple until Ari starts talking about new friends. Children who live in the walls. Children counting numbers no one taught him. Children who want him to find something hidden before "the game" is over.

The locals go quiet every time she asks about the fire that gutted the east wing in 1974. The boarded-off door at the end of the corridor won't stay boarded. And late one stormy August evening, during an ordinary game of hide-and-seek at the edge of the water, Ari doesn't come back.

Nine days. No trace. A tide that erases footprints and a village that would rather bury the truth a second time than dig it up again.

But Elín isn't leaving because the deeper she digs into Hrafnvík's past, the more she realizes her own mother's death, thirty years earlier, on that same shoreline, was never the accident she'd always been told it was. Something in that house has been waiting a very long time for someone to stop looking away. And it may have just gotten exactly who it wanted.

The House at Hrafnvík is a slow-burn gothic thriller about the debts silence leaves behind and how far a mother will go to pay them off before it's too late.

12) Oath of Courage by Finn Sparks to be published on the 9th of August 2026. Viking. 418 pages.

A WARRIOR’S STRENGTH IS HIS HONOUR
WITHOUT IT HE IS NOTHING
The story following ‘Blood Revenge’ continues

One will fight any battle, plunder any hoard and carry out any deed
regardless of risk, to gain word-fame and become greater than
his father.

One must shed his childhood self, and through blood and courage,
prove himself worthy to lead the men who will fight and die to
make him king.

One strives to reclaim his woman from the evil spirits that
possess her mind, and plunges them both into a
nightmare.

13) Old One-Eye: A Bear Peak short story bypChristoffer Petersen to be published the 25th of August 2026. Greenland. 20 pages.

Fall is coming to Bear Peak, and John laces up his boots for a slow walk from the cabin, just a little ways up the mountain with his dog, Chester.

Old One-Eye is a gentle story set in the mountains. It won’t take long to read, unless you want it to.

14) SILENCE: Tore Toresen: File One by Thomas J. Slagter to be published on the 11th of August 2026. Norway & Sweden. 262 Pages.

Tore Toresen — ex-police detective — has a scar across his skull, a diagnosis he doesn't like to talk about, and nothing left to fill the silence of his Oslo flat. An anonymous message about a missing woman changes that.

Her disappearance is ruled an accident. Her file is blacked out, retracted by someone with more power than the police. Tore is set to find out what really happened.

The trail leads north, over the border into Sweden, to a journalist protecting a source. A source that Tore needs to find.

By the time the trail ends, it's bigger than a missing-person case — bigger than Tore is prepared for.

SILENCE is the first file in the Tore Toresen series: a Nordic thriller about power and those who fight against it.

15) Iceland Light: Beneath the Ice, a Frozen Moment Sleeps. by K.R. Sterling to be published on the 21st of August 2026. Iceland. 38 pages.

"This time, I'll be the one waiting."

She kept her promise. In a glass house at the edge of a glacier, Ren and Elena finally get the one thing the syndicate never allowed them: time. Two days of snowbound quiet, a borrowed kitchen, the northern lights — and the first kiss that no one is running from.

But beneath the ice waits the last secret of Ren's mentor: a frozen garden built for a dead woman, and the forty-year obsession that turned a collector into a monster.

Book Four of Destiny's Edge. Some things should not be preserved. Some things must finally thaw.

16) Lucia's Blood: Swedish crime thriller by Fiona Limar & Leif Eklund to be published on the 7th of August 2026. Sweden. 284 pages.

BEWARE OF YOUR DREAMS — THEY MIGHT COME TRUE!
Nearly every girl in Sweden dreams of being Lucia at least once. But for two of them, that dream turns into a nightmare with no way out. As the police pursue a brutal killer fuelled by twisted fantasies, the sister of one of the victims finds herself increasingly caught in a web of lies and addictions. Will she be the next to fall victim? And are her new friends as selfless as they appear?

17) The Wrong Woman: A Transatlantic Thriller by BB Giesler to be published on the 4th of August 2026. Iceland. 159 pages.

When the past refuses to stay silent, running isn’t enough.


FBI Agent Sadie Barker came to Iceland to disappear—into the fog, into the silence, into a life with no cases and no questions she can’t answer. With her service dog, Nigel, and Ginny, MJ, and Audrey, her beloved (and unconventional) old biddies, she feels confident enforcing her one rule: don’t look back.

Then she hears a voice from a cold case.

And a chance encounter spirals into a storm-driven pursuit across the North Atlantic—onto a cargo ship, through icy darkness, to a lawless outpost where the only way out is through. Someone remembers what Sadie thought she’d escaped. Someone is tracking Nigel. And the truth she’s been running from? Well, she can’t escape.

Perfect for fans of The Thursday Murder Club and Only Murders in the Building, this atmospheric thriller delivers:
A fierce FBI agent who can’t outrun her own story
A loyal K-9 partner with secrets of his own
A crew of sharp-tongued allies who refuse to play it safe
Storm-swept Icelandic settings that feel like another character
Buried secrets, dangerous truths, and a cold case on fire


The past didn’t stay frozen. Can Sadie withstand the burn?

18) Ben Burside - The Cold Ledger: The Cold Ledger by Troy Phillips to be published on the 14th of August 2026. Finland. 81 pages.

He has never been registered, taxed, arrested, or written down. He is forty-four years old. He is about to become the most dangerous man alive.

In the frozen north of Finland, a man walks into a police station and asks to be arrested. He has committed no crime. He carries no documents. He has lived alone in a forest for twenty-seven years, cut his own wood, taught himself five languages from books, and bought the same nine items from a shop in Kuusamo on the second Tuesday of every month since 2003.

His name is Tomas. He has no surname. He does not officially exist.

When his fingerprints match two active British intelligence officers simultaneously, Ben Burside and his brother Nicholas fly north to find him. What they discover in a wooden house at the end of an eleven-kilometre forest track will force them to confront a truth their father buried with a stranger in 2003: that there were never two brothers. There were three. And the third one was kept clean for a reason.

Someone has spent forty-four years making sure Tomas Burside has no history. Someone has paid two hundred thousand euro a year to a Vienna consultancy to confirm, once a month, that he is still in his house. And now that he has walked into a police station and asked to be written down, that someone has eleven days before the only thing that made him valuable is gone.

THE QUIET SON is the third Ben Burside novel — a spy thriller built on family secrets, Cold War paper trails, and the single most dangerous thing an intelligence service can create: a person who doesn't exist.

From the frozen lakes of Finnish Lapland to the intelligence back-channels of Tallinn, Vienna and a churchyard in Alnwick on the brothers' forty-fourth birthday, this is espionage fiction that earns every twist — and sets up a revelation that changes everything that came before it.

Perfect for fans of Mick Herron, John le Carré, and Charles McCarry.

Also in the series: The Cold Ledger · The Spare Man · The Iron Hand

19) The Canvas Whisperer: A Nordic Noir Psychological Thriller of Obsession, Manipulation, and Hidden Truths by Erik Vahlgren to be published on the 16th of August 2026. Scandinavia. 48 pages.

Solveig Bjørnsen notices everything.

For years, she has quietly observed the routines of her elderly neighbor, Mrs. Engen. Then one evening, something changes.

A light is wrong.

A curtain is out of place.

And Mrs. Engen is no longer behaving as she always has.

When the police dismiss Solveig's concerns, she begins investigating alone. A hidden camera fragment and a recorded confession convince her that something sinister is happening—but proving it may put her in danger.

As Solveig follows the clues, she discovers that Mrs. Engen is being manipulated by someone who understands exactly how fear and isolation can control a person.

And Solveig may have been part of the plan all along.

The Canvas Whisperer is a haunting Nordic Noir psychological thriller about obsession, surveillance, manipulation, and the dangerous things hidden behind ordinary lives.