Posts Tagged the ring road

Other People's Books

The Dead of Summer

April 5, 2013 by

BY EDWARD WEINMAN

During the Scandinavian winters, the cold creeps into your bones. The sky is gray like a bullet. And snow dumps continuously, turning ashen as exhaust spews from cars and buses.

Winter’s attributes mark the perfect setting for Scando crime novels, where killers are on the loose, hiding out in the murky darkness of an urban cityscape. This bleak, mysterious setting is brilliantly turned on its head in The Dead of Summer, the fifth novel in Mari Jungstedt’s Gotland series, featuring detective superintendent Anders Knutas. In The Dead of Summer, Jungstedt once again sequesters her readers on Gotland and other Swedish islands located in the Baltic Sea–but this time during the height of summer.

Whatever the weather, islands are the ideal location for Jungstedt’s crime thrillers: tension rises when detectives Knutas and his protégé Dead of SummerKarin Jacobsson, meddling TV journalist Johan Berg and his photographer Pia, and we the readers are trapped in a claustrophobic space with an unknown killer, our only escape the odd ferry.

The Dead of Summer begins with the murder of a vacationing father on the beach, a summer idyll gone awry. In a city like Stockholm, the suspect could be anywhere in the city’s denseness, hiding out in alleys, underpasses or tenements rising high into the burlap sky. But on Gotland–or in this case Fårö, where the murder takes place–the perp is someone from the tented campsite where Peter Bovide was vacationing with his wife and small children.

In another twist, Jungstedt launches her novel without her protagonist. The murder occurs while detective Knutas is off island taking a much-deserved vacation, which means Jacobsson must handle the investigation on her own. But ever the workaholic, Knutas can’t stay away for long, and his return is met with mixed emotions by Jacobsson: she is glad to have him back, but frustrated not to sleuth out the suspects all on her own.

Jungstedt’s taut prose is gloriously deceptive. The Dead of Summer is not a fast-moving thriller, but the author’s storytelling delves briskly into her characters’ personal lives, a much-welcomed break from so many Scando crime novels that read too much like a screenplay–all action and zero interior motivations.

Without overloading the novel with action-packed set pieces, Jungstedt provides readers with enough bullet-torn corpses and mystery to keep us turning the pages. Eventually those pages lead lead to the docking of a Russian ship, and a second murder that sends Knutas and Jacobsson scurrying to find the missing link between the two deaths.

All month long, we’re celebrating the great books coming out of the upstart digital publisher Stockholm Text. And we’re pairing their best with ours. Right now, you can grab Mari Jungstedt’s latest novel Killer’s Art in a bundle with Edward Weinman’s debut Icelandic thriller The Ring Road.  Buy them both with one click below, and be transported to the chilly criminal landscapes imagined by two accomplished authors.

“Killer’s Art + The Ring Road” by Mari Jungstedt + Edward Weinman on Ganxy

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The Killer Icelandic Pimp

February 4, 2013 by

Edward Weinman looks back on the Icelandic inspiration for his character Jon Kari, a morally corrupt entrepreneur who forever changes the life of Hobson, the American protagonist in Weinman’s The Ring Road, a Nordic thriller set in Iceland after a glacial volcano erupts with a vengeance.

I met my first pimp when I was in middle school.

As a sixth grader, my friends and I would sit outside Superette, a convenience store located on Monroe Street, across from Oregon State’s campus, and drink 32 oz. cups of Mt. Dew.

Amped on caffeine and sugar, we watched an amazing world pass us by: beefy football players walking with their petite girlfriends; hippies slurping coffee while riding bikes; and Frat guys buying cases of beer for parties that I would, years later, sneak into in order to meet girls.

But nothing sparked my imagination as much as the man who looked like the zoot-suit and hat-wearing pimp Huggy Bear from the ’70’s American cop drama “Starsky and Hutch.”

Our pimp drove a pink Cadillac up and down Monroe, day after day. He always had two pretty women riding shotgun. When he stepped out of his car to pick up some road snacks at Superette, my friends and I would pester him with all sorts of questions about what he was doing.

“Who are the girls?” and “Can we ride along?” and “How much does it cost?”

He’d casually respond with a cool smile and a wink. Sometimes, he’d even buy us chocolate bars.

Flash forward to my life in Iceland where I worked as a journalist for Iceland Review and Atlantica magazine. Out on the razzle one night, I ran into a friend of mine at Kaffibarinn. My friend used to work sales for a publishing company. Like myself, he was on a pub-crawl, although he was, unlike me, sitting next to two drop-dead, sexy blonde women, along with two American tourists with wide smiles plastered to their faces and bloodshot eyes, a sure sign of either jetlag or intoxication.

My friend began telling me all about his new business, “Reykjavik Nightlife.”

“For a small fee I show tourists around Reykjavik,” he told me.

My friend was dressed in a sharp suit. His “clients” also wore suits, too smart for Kaffibarinn, the popular drinking hole frequented by the “it” people who live in 101 Reykjavik: artists, filmmakers, musicians—those who normally wear jeans, T-shirts and ratty jackets to prove to everyone that they are hip enough not to care about appearances.

I told my friend that his business model would fail, because the bars with the highest cool-quotient were pretty much all located in a cluster, like a herd of sheep walking down the main shopping street.

“Why would anyone pay you to take them on a pub-crawl? All the pubs are right here,” I said, gesturing with my hands to indicate the close proximity of Reykjavik’s nightspots.

He looked at the drop-dead gorgeous women next to him, women who belonged on the cover of a glossy magazine, women who are ubiquitous in Reykjavik. He then glanced over at the two tourists, who at this point were buying rounds of hot shots (2 parts Galliano, 2 parts coffee, 1 part whip cream and 1 pinch nutmeg) for their “dates.” Turning back to me, my friend smiled. Then he winked.

I understood. My friend had metamorphosed into that man who drove a pink Cadillac through Corvallis, into the Icelandic version of Huggy Bear.

Before leaving, I said “Góða skemmtun” to the ladies of the evening, only to notice they didn’t understand my simple Icelandic, which meant nothing more than “have fun.”

The women, I figured, were from Eastern Europe and probably moonlighting from their job at Odal, what was then one of Reykjavik’s posh gentleman clubs.

(Iceland’s lesbian prime minister has since outlawed these gentlemen clubs.)

Later that night, as I was drinking beer with friends in a crowded bar, and over the live music trying to chat up an extremely attractive woman who, too, belonged on the cover of a glossy magazine, I thought to myself:

Why the hell spend money on Reykjavik Nightlife when you can hit up just about any bar, café or disco in Iceland’s capital and roll the dice with a simple twist of fate.

Edward Weinman is a former staff writer for Iceland Review. He now writes for Whitman College, and occasionally blogs for huffingtonpost. His debut novel The Ring Road is available now.

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The Rogue Reader + Bublish

January 25, 2013 by

Remember what it felt like to browse in bookstores? Shelf after shelf of books, calling to you by their art or author, often surprising you with a new story or writer. The element of serendipity and unintended discovery isn’t as easy to come by in the chaos of social media and the immensity of virtual shopping. That’s why we’ve partnered with new tech start-up Bublish to try to recreate that bookstore experience.

Bublish welcomes authors to build discrete book pages that include an excerpt from one’s book surrounded by author commentary about that excerpt, placing it in its creative context and giving it real-world connection. The results are surprisingly moving. As much as we love Twitter and Facebook, what gets left out too often is context. Bublish builds a place for authors to share the story around the story.

In a few of our Bublish pages: Ro Cuzon talks about his friend’s bar that served as a gathering place after Katrina and inspired the bar in Under the Dixie Moon; Ro relates his memories of the gritty St Bart’s that inspired Under the Carib Sun, a place very different from the common vision of a pristine island for the wealthy; Michael Hogan talks about the legendary art that organizes his literary mystery Sistine, and the gritty rust-belt town that sits at the center of his noir Dog Hills; and Edward Weinman talks about the real Iceland at the heart of his crime novel The Ring Road, a land of isolation that drives people to despair, or, if they’re lucky, hope. You can click on the images below to preview our work with Bublish, or follow the links above to see Bublish in action.

Pop over to Bublish and browse around. If you stumble upon an author or story you like, perhaps it will remind you of the feeling you once had of pulling a random book off a bookstore shelf and, improbably, finding it was the perfect fit.

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Reviews & Press

Jim Bock Interview Edward Weinman

January 23, 2013 by

KUJ’s Jim Bock – aka “the voice of the valley” – interviews Edward Weinman about The Ring Road.

EdwardWeinmanTheRingRoad11813

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The Devilish Icelandic Landscape

January 21, 2013 by

BY EDWARD WEINMAN

 

Mt. Hekla erupted and lava spewed down the face of Iceland’s most notorious volcano.

The February 2000, volcanic explosion was an open invitation for me, only one year into my new life in Reykjavík writing for Iceland Review, to jump in an SUV and speed towards what Europeans once called the ‘Gateway to Hell.’

Mt. Hekla has erupted over 20 times since 874 A.D., making it Iceland’s most active volcano. The stratovolcano has belched up 10 percent of the tephra produced in Iceland over the last 1000 years. The nearly 5,000-foot mountain has also accounted for one of the largest lava outflows in the world over the last millennium, around 8 km3.

None of these facts were in my mind after news of the eruption broke. I wanted to see lava.

I could barely contain myself during the drive through the electric, winter-white landscape. The bright sunlight reflecting off the snowy tundra made me understand the definition of snow-blind.

About 30 minutes outside of Selfoss, a small town in South Iceland on the road to nowhere, the landscape turned black. It looked burnt. The scorched earth meant the mountain lurked ahead.

After a spinout in the ice that forced us to shovel the SUV out of a snow-bank, we arrived.

We could only drive so close to Mt. Hekla, but from where we stopped the SUV, I could see lava bubbling over.

This is Iceland, I thought to myself. All was quiet, as my travel partners and I stood watch. So silent was the landscape I could nearly hear my heart beat. With my pulse quickened, it felt beguiling to breathe. The mountain was alive. Threatening.

Twelve years after this spellbinding moment, a Nordic thriller was born. My debut novel, The Ring Road, a blend of crime and dark fantasy, is now out. The Ring Road takes place after a glacial volcano awakens with a series of eruptions, stranding ex-cop Hobson at 66° North where human behavior is as unpredictable as the weather. Hobson’s quickly ensnared in a bizarre murder investigation involving Gummi, a road-weary homicide detective; Jon Kari, an amoral entrepreneur; Snorri, a brutal pimp; and Úlfar, a homicidal sheep farmer. As Hobson falls in with a group of enigmatic tourists trying to survive the volcanic aftermath, the chase for a killer pushes them all to the edge of the inhabitable world.

“The Ring Road blends the inventive plotting of Jo Nesbo, the dark fantasies of Stieg Larsson and the hardboiled anti-heroes of Elmore Leonard in a dark-hearted crime drama set in the fire and ice of the world’s most enigmatic island,” Adam Chromy, publisher at The Rogue Reader, says.

While I was writing The Ring Road, Eyjafjallajökull erupted, releasing a volcanic cloud into the atmosphere that caused European nations to ground air traffic, stranding millions of travelers across the globe and costing airlines €150 million (USD 196 million) a day for six days, according to London’s The Telegraph.

Like the song ‘Hotel California’ by the Eagles, you can visit Iceland but you can never truly leave. Not only does the sublime, surreal Icelandic landscape stick in your subconscious, but the tiny, wind-swept island located in the middle of the North Atlantic can strand a traveler in Asia who is trying to fly to Europe.

Iceland’s reach is endless.

I began revising The Ring Road. What if an American tourist named Hobson, traveling through Iceland on his way to Europe, became stuck in the country due to a massive volcanic eruption? Suppose Hobson, an ex-cop trying to weed away the memories of his failed marriage, became tangled up in a murder investigation while he and a group of tourists tried to flee the carnage the volcano inflicted upon the countryside? And what if a series of traumatic events, brought on by both natural causes and personal transgressions, introduced Hobson to the best and vilest sides of humanity?

The Scando crime thriller unfolds while the novels’ characters struggle along Iceland’s Ring Road, which circumnavigates the country over an ever-changing, unforgiving, dangerous netherworld.

Could an eruption really wreak havoc on an entire nation? Yes. In 1783, Laki erupted continuously for eight months, generating so much ash, hydrogen fluoride and sulphur dioxide that it killed one in five Icelanders and half of the country’s livestock.
It was a nuclear winter. The Laki eruption actually changed the Earth’s climate.

In The Ring Road, the heroes and anti-heroes navigate this cruel climate as they try to survive the worst nature, and human beings, have to offer.

 

This piece originally appeared in Daily Life, a feature of the Iceland Review.

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A volcanic eruption. An unforgiving landscape. And a killer on the loose.

January 10, 2013 by

Our latest Web ad for Edward Weinman‘s captivating Icelandic thriller.

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Barnes & Noble Selects Edward Weinman’s THE RING ROAD for Nook First

January 9, 2013 by

Barnes and Noble has selected Edward Weinman‘s Icelandic crime novel The Ring Road for its Nook First program. You can see it listed here as a “compelling read from emerging author”.  Congratulations to Edward as we watch him climb the Nook charts!

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