“Torfi’s accidental confession cannonballs into a spiral of deceit he can barely understand, let alone control.”

Hotels aren’t always places to relax. Guests arrive with their own baggage, both physical and emotional, and behind closed doors, many secrets play out. In Erlendur Arason’s debut novel The Hotel Manager’s Guide to Murder, however, those secrets include murder, violence and corruption.

At the Hotel Bristol in Reykjavik, head office is looking to make staffing cuts that would see restaurant supervisor Torfi made redundant. In a moment of panic, Torfi utters one simple line that will change his life.

His ‘I know everything’ was meant as a reflection of his experience in the hospitality industry. His bosses, however, see it as a confession that he knows all about some shady business deals and, instead of sacking him, promote him – along with a generous envelope of cash.

It’s a promotion Torfi wasn’t expecting. Then again, nor was he expecting to be called to the hotel in the middle of the night to help dispose of the body of a young man found murdered on the ninth floor.

So begins a multi-sided game of cat and mouse, with Torfi forced to live up to his claim of knowing about corporate corruption despite having no idea what is going on, while also avoiding suspicion from the police investigating the murder and playing the role of hotel manager turned hitman organiser.

Why The Hotel Manager’s Guide to Murder is a Must-Read

It’s a beautifully constructed thriller from Arason, tautly plotted and laced with enough dark humour to keep readers hooked throughout.

Torfi is a fascinating central character, the perfect example of someone being in the right place at the wrong time. This is a man trapped both professionally and personally, whose loyalty to the hotel and its mysterious corporate owners is bound up with professional pride. Room service takes on a very different meaning when you are asked to dispose of a body.

He’s also trapped in a spiral of deceit, his earlier confession cannonballing out of control as he tries to play along with a game whose rules he doesn’t know. Torfi could all too easily be played as a comedic stooge, a witless buffoon being used for his naivety, but Arason’s construct is much deeper.

Here’s a man who is more than capable of his managerial post, whose slip of the tongue gets misconstrued, and whose every turn digs him deeper into a plot he doesn’t understand. It is an unusual concept for a central character in Nordic Noir, far away from the usual darker, troubled, souls, but it works well.

This, though, isn’t your standard Nordic Noir. The murder here is almost secondary to the wider corporate power struggles, which, while amplified for dramatic effect, will be familiar to anyone who has worked in a large organisation.

There is the distrust of head office, the influx of managers with MBAs but little practical experience, and an organisation whose internal communication runs as much on office gossip as it does on official channels.

Arason takes this dual-faceted world – the calm public face and the more chaotic  life behind the scenes – and uses it to create an utterly believable setting where the slippery slope to downfall begins with just one simple phrase.

It all makes for a highly believable world that readers can easily connect to. Written with a driving pace (a pace sustained by Quentin Bates’s punchy translation), events move quickly, though never at the cost of losing detail.

As befits the first book of a new trilogy, plenty of unresolved threads remain at the end to tempt readers back into books two and three. With the exposition handled adeptly here, those next two instalments promise even more action for our somewhat bewildered hotelier.

There may be scant details about the author himself, but The Hotel Manager’s Guide to Murder is an exciting check-in to the Icelandic literary scene, and one that will make readers look more carefully next time they arrive at a hotel reception desk.

The Hotel Manager’s Guide to Murder by Erlendur Arason, translated by Quentin Bates, is published by Blekverk on July 25 2026