Book Beginnings: Operation Napoleon by Arnaldur Indriðason

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading and TBR 23 in 23 on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, last year I decided to finally participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. This week I’m back with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply “share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight.”

MY BOOK BEGINNING

A blizzard raged on the glacier.

He could see nothing ahead, could barely make out the compass in his hand. He could not turn back even if he wanted to. There was nothing to go back to. The storm stung and lashed his face, hurling hard, cold flakes at him from every direction.

Last week I featured Alan Furst’s 2019 historical thriller Under Occupation. The week before it was Swiss writer Robert Pagani’s 2010 debut novel The Princess, The King and The Anarchist. This week it’s the 2011 Icelandic thriller Operation Napoleon by Arnaldur Indriðason. 

I haven’t had good luck with Icelandic authors so I was a little hesitant to take a chance on Indriðason. But I’m happy to say so far this novel has been a lot of fun. So much so I’m now ready to explore the rest of his fiction. Here’s what Amazon has to say about Operation Napoleon. 

A mesmerizing international thriller that sweeps from modern Iceland to Nazi Germany. In 1945, a German bomber crash-lands in Iceland durign a blizzard. Puzzlingly, there are both German and American officers on board. One of the senior German officers claims that their best chance of survival is to try to walk to the nearest farm. He sets off, a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, only to disappear into the white vastness. Flash forward to the present. The U.S. Army is clandestinely trying to remove the wreck of an airplane from an Icelandic glacier.

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