Cold Comfort by Quentin Bates

This is the second in the series by Quentin Bates featuring Sergeant Gunnhildur, otherwise known as Gunna, and is set in Iceland.  The first book; Frozen Out was published in January 2011, you can read my review of it here.

Cold Comfort was published by Constable Robinson in March of this year.  Gunna has been promoted and is now working in the Serious Crime Unit in the capital city of  Reykjavik, a big change from her previous posting in a small, slow-moving town.

Gunna finds herself heading up two separate crime investigations, at least they seem to be pretty separate at first, but deeper investigation soon turns up quite a few links between the cases.  The first case seems pretty straight forward; a prison inmate has escaped and is dealing out his own form of punishment to his old acquaintances. The second case is a murder - a C list celebrity who has been discovered murdered in her flat.

As with Frozen Out, this is a well thought out story, with an intricate and well woven plot line.  I enjoyed the twists and turns of the story, I enjoyed getting to know a little more about Gunna (although she's very close, and doesn't reveal much).   Just one minor issue for me, as with the first novel, is the long Icelandic names of the characters.  It's very easy to get them muddled up, many of them sound the same and look the same, and it was quite some time into the novel before I got to grips with just who is who.

This certainly does not spoil the book at all.   Gunna is a great heroine and the tantalising glimpses into her past history and her current private life certainly set the reader up for more to come in this series.

I will certainly be following Gunna's next move and look forward to more in the series.

As always, my thanks go to Emily from Constable Robinson for keeping me supplied with great reading material and forwarding my copy for this review.