On the second day of my trip to Iceland, in the capital city of Reykjavík, a dog was lost on the street where I was staying. The Facebook messages went out: ‘Does anyone know whose dog this is?’ Within the hour, the response arrived: ‘Yes, that’s Baltasar’s dog. He’s just around the corner.’

Baltasar Kormákur’s television series Trapped embodies all that comes with living in such a small community. It’s easy to find your dog, but hard to get away. The show moves with great deftness between the comfort of small community and the simmering rage of enforced closeness.

With the screening of the first series of Trapped, Kormákur made his mark on television; he was, probably, already Iceland’s best-known film director. Series One centred on the small, northern-most town of Siglufjörður, where there was a body in a fjord and a snowstorm closing in.

In Series Two, Trapped emerges into daylight. At first it seems less claustrophobic than Series One with its endless snowstorm and seething tensions. Andri is back in Reykjavík. It seems as far removed from the frontier town of Siglufjörður as is possible. In the first episode, the minister for industry is set on fire in the streets of Reykjavík by someone who appears to be an extremist. The suspected extremist is, in fact, the minister’s brother, Gisli. He dies in the attack, she is burnt. The prime minister voices a question that seems impossible for any of us to grasp: would a brother kill his sister, and himself, for a cause?

It transpires that Gisli lived in Siglufjörður – and Andri is sent back there to investigate. And so we return to the singular, haunting beauty of rural Iceland. It’s an Iceland of sagas old and new; a place of new industry, of close, troubled families and of geopolitical change. It’s great to be back.

Marie Matteson is a book buyer at Readings Carlton.