Winterlude

Travel Guide

Reykjavik

From the capital city to the frozen north, the novel takes place in a few locations and is based from the serious crimes unit  in Reykjavik. The view of the city is not the best as many scenes are set in and around a violent killing in an abandoned industrial unit.

“Stone dead and it’s a damned mess”

Helgi grew up in the north of Iceland so when the investigation takes a turn, he is sent there to investigate.

Hvalvik

Not the real one in the Faroe Islands but  a fictional one in Iceland

From the author:

But there have been questions about Hvalvík. There’s a real place in Iceland called Hvalvík but that’s not the fictional Hvalvík. The genuine Hvalvík is in the north-east of Iceland, and it’s a small, uninhabited inlet that’s hardly even a bay, a few kilometres north of Kópasker. The Hvalvík I’ve written about is an amalgam of half a dozen places. It would probably have been easier to adopt coastal village somewhere and use that. Somewhere on the south-west corner would have done the trick. Vogar, maybe, or else Sandgerði, or Garður. But let’s just say that Hvalvík is somewhere on the south coast, a few miles east of Grindavík.

“I was happy enough to write about real places in and around Reykjavík, but taking on a smaller place with all the opportunities to find myself unwittingly portraying a real mayor, schoolteacher, petrol pump attendant, waitress or police officer were too risky to my mind. Going for a fictional place, even if it is simply an amalgam of the features of several fishing villages, seemed the safer route.”