Getting Into Yrsa Sigurdardottir's Inspector Erlendur Series
I've been reading crime fiction for about fifteen years, and Yrsa Sigurdardottir occupies a specific corner of that genre that's harder to pin down than most authors. Her Inspector Erlendur series runs ten books, and I Remember You is the fourth one in the sequence. If you're coming in cold, here's what you need to know about actually reading it, where to find it, and why the pacing in particular editions of the translation matters more than most people realize. The book follows Erlendur Sveinsson, an aging police inspector in Reykjavik dealing with a cold case involving two boys who disappeared from a holiday camp decades earlier. There's also a parallel storyline involving a present-day victim. Sigurdardottir weaves both timelines together, and the structure is deliberate rather than gimmicky. The novel came out in Icelandic in 2003 and was translated into English by Bernard Scudder, who handled most of the Erlendur titles. His translation tends toward functional clarity rather than literary flourish, which works in the author's favor because the prose is already spare. If you want a physical copy, the most common edition is the Picador paperback from 2007, ISBN 978-0330500582. You can pick it up used on AbeBooks or ThriftBooks for somewhere between four and twelve dollars depending on condition. The ebook version is available through Amazon Kindle and Kobo, usually priced around seven dollars for the paperback equivalent. Audiobook versions exist too, narrated by David Thorpe, and they run about nine hours. The audiobook is worth considering if you commute, because Sigurdardottir's dialogue heavy sections benefit from being heard rather than read silently. The pacing slows down noticeably in the middle third of the book, and that's where the audio format actually helps you push through without losing momentum.
How to Read This Without Getting Lost
The dual timeline structure trips up a fair number of readers. You'll encounter alternating chapters that jump between the 1970s disappearance and the present day investigation. Some editions flag these shifts with section breaks, but the Picador paperback does not. I learned this the hard way during a reread when I spent about twenty minutes confused about which timeline I was actually in, tracking characters back through my notes to reconstruct what happened. The workaround was straightforward: I started keeping a simple two-column reference sheet with character names on one side and their timeline designation on the other. It took maybe five minutes to set up and saved me from having to flip back repeatedly. Another thing most readers don't notice going in: the Erlendur books are connected but don't require sequential reading. Each novel contains enough exposition to stand alone, though certain character arcs and personal history details accumulate across the series. If you start with I Remember You, you'll miss some context about Erlendur's family dynamics that gets clarified in later books, but you won't be lost. The mystery itself is self-contained. I'd recommend reading them in publication order if you have the patience, but it's not a requirement for comprehension. There's also a structural quirk worth mentioning. Sigurdardottir places the most important revelation about the cold case approximately two-thirds of the way through the book. After that, the remaining chapters are largely procedural and character resolution. Some readers find the ending stretches a bit thin, and honestly, they're not wrong. The final forty pages feel like they could have been trimmed by roughly a third without affecting the narrative. This isn't unusual for crime fiction published in the early 2000s, but it's something to be aware of so you don't expect a tight finish after a tightly constructed middle section.
Where to Get It and What Editions Exist
Beyond the Picador paperback, there's a newer edition from Soho Crime that came out around 2018 with updated typography and a different cover design. The text is the same translation, so content-wise there's no difference, but the page layout is slightly more readable if you're sensitive to cramped type. The ISBN for that version is 978-1641291998. Libraries carry all editions through standard catalog systems, and Interlibrary Loan will pull one in within three to five business days if your local branch doesn't stock it. For the audiobook, David Thorpe's narration is consistently rated well, and you can find it on Audible, Scribd, and through your local library's digital platform if you have a partnership with OverDrive or Libby. I'd suggest reading the first chapter of the ebook or listening to the first chapter on audiobook before committing to the full purchase. The opening establishes the tone and the translation's cadence, which isn't for everyone. Some readers find Sigurdardottir's style too methodical, and that impression usually solidifies within the first few chapters.
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The Uncomfortable Truth About This Book
The Erlendur series has a genuine flaw that most reviewers gloss over. The central mystery in I Remember You is solid, but the character work around Erlendur's personal life sometimes circles the same emotional beats across multiple novels. He struggles with his father's death, his relationship with his children, his health decline. It's authentic human behavior, and Sigurdardottir renders it honestly, but by book four or five it starts to feel repetitive. This is normal for a long-running series, but it's worth knowing before you commit to reading all ten books straight through. There's also a translation issue that affects readability. Bernard Scudder's version occasionally flattens certain Icelandic idioms and cultural references that carry weight in the original. A few readers have reported confusion around scenes involving church or religious imagery that means something different in Icelandic culture than it does in English. Nothing that breaks the plot, but if you're the type who notices these things, it might bother you. For most readers it's invisible, which is the point of competent translation anyway. If you finish this one and want something similar, Ann Cleeves' Vera Stanhope series has a comparable tone, though it's set in England rather than Iceland. Jo Nesbo's Harry Hole books go darker and more violent, while Arnaldur Indridason's Erlendur Sherlock series shares the same Icelandic setting but takes a different structural approach. None of those are replacements for Sigurdardottir, but they occupy adjacent territory if you're building a reading list around this style of crime fiction.
