Book review: Cold Comfort

I got the first couple of Quentin Bates novels on a kindle special offer, and after Frozen Out a few months back I figured I'd also give Cold Comfort a go. This one sees the recently-promoted Gunnhildur investigate the murder of a famous-for-being-famous Icelandic celebrity. I didn't dislike it but I think this is where I part company with Bates' Icelandic mysteries. The trouble is I'm never the best with remembering character names, and in crime novels that can be awkward when there's a bit surprise appearance by X who's suddenly revealed to be the killer... and it takes me several pages to remember which one X is. So add to that foreign names that I can give no mnemonic association to, and the Icelandic tradition of patronymic surnames that makes everyone's names blur into each other, and I'm frequently too lost to end up caring much. Here I spent several pages thinking we'd had a nasty incestuous revelation about the murder victim and her brother, only to eventually realise we were dealing with one of her lovers and it hadn't all gone a bit Game of Thrones after all. I wasn't really getting enough from the story to make up for all that confusion, and Gunna herself is a bit of a bland central character so I can't see me revisiting the series.