I’m delighted to be taking part in a blog tour today for a new-to-me author and publisher: The Hotel Manager’s Guide to Murder by Erlendur Arason (2025, transl. Quentin Bates 2025) from Blekverk Books.
I’m always a bit trepidatious with books described as Nordic Noir – how noir are we talking? I’m really not in the market for anything gruesome. But the title sets the tone of a darkly comic crime thriller, which I really enjoyed. Here is the publisher’s summary:
“Guests at one of Reykjavík’s smartest hotels never know what happens behind the scenes – including what brings a group of the city’s homeless to the Bristol Hotel every winter night while the rest of the world sleeps.
When overworked supervisor Torfi finds himself given an unexpected promotion that comes with a respectable pay rise, he takes it as a lucky break – until he’s told to make a murder victim disappear, and that he doesn’t have any choice. That’s when his life rapidly gets a lot more complicated.
What isn’t he being told? Torfi doesn’t know, but when police officers Haukur and Dagný start asking awkward questions, he needs to find answers – even though he knows only half of the story.
Longing desperately to go back to his old, boring life, Torfi finds himself desperately out of his depth as his family are threatened and his problems spiral far out of his control.”
Torfi’s troubles begin when he is fired:
“Her voice was like silk slowly tearing.
‘But…’ Torfi’s mouth had already been dry, but now it was parched. ‘I … I know everything.’”
What he means is, he knows the job inside out. But shifty manager Ásbjörn and steely HR Head Sigríður assume he means something else entirely, and promptly give him a promotion and financial sweetener.
“He explored his stomach with one hand. There was no sign of the old tension that had so often left him doubled up in pain, but there was a fizzing ache in his chest that was new. He took more deep breaths with his eyes shut tight, as he wondered yet again what he had got himself into.”
While Torfi is grateful for the money, taking some of the pressure off him and his partner Stjana’s blended family, he also knows he is way out of his depth. There is something of the Hitchcockian wrong man to Torfi, caught up in a sinister conspiracy he barely understands.
“He chewed a sweet roll studded with caraway seeds and thought over what had gone on overnight, still hardly daring to believe that he had really assisted in disposing of a corpse in the middle of the night – for what? To protect someone powerful in the hierarchy? Why had he done that? He glumly admitted to himself that he knew the answer perfectly well. He had no choice in the matter. He’d accepted the money without a qualm, and now he would be paying that particular debt for a long time to come.”
As Torfi tries to piece together what on earth is going on at the hotel, there is plenty of opportunity for Arason to satirise corporate culture, the financial demands of modern life, and the easy disregard for lives that are not protected by wealth or power.
“Torfi shook his head. He reflected that the more he got to know his colleagues at management level, the more he was astonished at how different their lives were to those of the staff whose wages were paid every Friday.”
These wider points are woven through without slowing down the story at all, and the pace is compelling without feeling relentless. The plot is just twisty enough without ever stretching credibility and I raced through to find out what on earth was going on at the hotel.
There was so much to enjoy in The Hotel Manager’s Guide to Murder, and I’m looking forward to the next two instalments in this trilogy set around Reykjavik. I hope we get an update on Torfi, there are a few loose ends I’m keen to know the outcome of…
Here are the rest of the stops on the tour, so do find out how other bloggers found The Hotel Manager’s Guide to Murder:
madame bibi lophile recommends 