Ragnar Jonasson draws on Agatha Christie in his latest mystery thriller

Law professor and investment banker Ragnar Jonasson loves Agatha Christie's mystery novels so much that at the age of 17 he translated more than a dozen of them into his native Icelandic.

It should come as no surprise, then, that most of his crime novels, 13 in total, feature the same complicated plots, numerous red herrings and surprising twists for which Christie was known. This is certainly true of his latest novel, Death in the Sanatorium.

Three decades ago, in a small town in northern Iceland, a nurse was tortured and brutally murdered in a former tuberculosis sanatorium, now a medical research facility. Police initially identified five suspects, but when one of them, the head doctor, fell to his death from a hospital balcony, the case was closed. Police concluded that the doctor had committed suicide after killing the nurse.

Thirty years later, young Helgi Reykdal is curious to see what modern scientific police methods would have done to the case. He makes it the subject of his thesis in criminology and begins to dig into the past. He knocks on the doors of people who used to work at the research facility. He seeks out police officers who investigated the case and the suspects they exonerated.

To his surprise, his questions are answered with fear, mistrust and lies. He realizes that something is wrong.

What started as an academic exercise soon turns into a full-scale re-investigation of the old case. The tension mounts when the people Helgi interviews are themselves murdered – apparently in an attempt to cover up the truth.

As it turns out, Helgi is the son of a man who once owned a crime shop. Like his creator Jonasson, he admires classic crime novels and often reads them to escape the torment of his mentally ill and often violent wife, who provides the final twist in the novel.

Originally written in Icelandic and translated into English by Victoria Cribb, Death in the Sanatorium relies on too many cliches (breaking dawn, separating the wheat from the chaff, throwing in the towel, etc.) but otherwise does a good job of preserving the tone and clear style of Jonasson's prose.

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Bruce DeSilva, winner of the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award, is the author of the Mulligan mystery novels, including The Dread Line.

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