​There is so much we don't know about Icelandic crime-fiction writer Arnaldur Indriðason (including how to pronounce his last name). But Christmas is upon us and so it seemed like the perfect time to tear through his dark best-seller, Voices. In it, Indriðason's chief protagonist, Detective Erlendur, and his team investigate the pre-Yuletide murder of a part-time Santa Claus and hotel doorman found stabbed to death in his basement hotel room with his bright red Santa pants around his ankles.

One unexpectedly gripping part of Indriðason's Reykjavík-based series is that when you meet the Inspector in the first novel, Jar City, he is just a depressed, sad-eyed crime-solver with a pissed-off ex-wife and a junkie freeloader for a daughter. But in this installment of the Erlendur series, Indriðason offers up snippets from the intrepid detective's childhood that give context to his air of buzzkill.

Erlendur also spends a lot of time fantasizing about eating boiled smoked mutton. Which got us wondering, "Is this a special Icelandic Christmas dish?" Through the miracle of Facebook we reached out to a resident of Reykjavík, Skarphéðinn Guðmundsson, (who also goes by the more manageable, Skarpi) who was kind enough to answer our questions without once mocking our simpleton questions: "What is boiled smoked mutton?" "Is it a traditional Christmas food?" "What does it taste like?" "How is it served?"

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