Description
When the skeletons of a young woman and a baby are uncovered on
a long-abandoned farm in Hvalfjörður, it is clear they were buried
years apart. West Iceland CID begins to investigate the disturbing
discovery, aware that someone has gone to great lengths to keep the
past hidden.
In Akranes, Karitas, a young single mother seeking a new start, settles
in with her four-year-old son and rents a basement flat from an
eccentric landlord. A cautious sense of happiness returns when she
meets the boy next door.
But when news breaks that a local girl has been murdered, Karitas
must decide who she can trust, knowing that one wrong choice could
place her and her child in danger. Detective Elma is drawn into the
case, forced to navigate long-hidden family secrets to understand a
killer’s motive, while struggling to hold together her increasingly
troubled relationship with Sævar.
My Review
Elma is feeling rough, Saevar is being weird, and there’s two skeletons in an old cow barn. It’s cold, it’s dark, and Adda keeps getting sick. But the job goes on and so, they investigate.
Meanwhile, Karitas and her son Bessi have moved to Akranes for a job, the basement flat is small, furnished, and the landlord, Baldvin, is a weird old man but he seems harmless enough until Karitas sees his daughter’s preserved bedroom.
Their neighbour Kristofer, his father Hemmi, and step-mother Ros, seem friendly. Kristofer is very friendly very quickly.
Elma and the team struggle to make any progress on the case until an old photograph turns up of a young woman from 1969 and DNA results come back for one of the bodies. They are connected, but not initially.
In a small town in Iceland everyone is related, just not always in the way they think they are and some secrets won’t stay in the past.
That’s the big twist at the end. I’m not going to explain it any further, you’ll have to read the book to find out what I mean.
The red-herrings and twists are nicely inserted and come unexpectedly. The contrast between what people say and how they act is played well, and the relationship between Karitas, Bessi and Baldvin is developed carefully. Baldvin is a complex character who shows love in odd ways. Kristofer is a damaged man who manipulates the situation to get what he wants. Karitas doesn’t know who to trust, although Bessi definitely does.
I can’t comment on the translation by Victoria Cribb, since I haven’t read the original and can’t read Icelandic, but I loved the prose. It’s steady, sensible, language, like I imagine Elma to be.
The setting matches the tone of the novel, the characters are complex and the cases fascinating. There’s always some development in Elma’s life that’s happening as she investigates, and the timeline for the investigations are always realistic – it takes weeks to get DNA results, days for an autopsy, and sometimes people mess up. The added memoirs from ‘side-characters’ who aren’t really side characters add to depth of the story, in this case a woman who is unknown until the end.
There’s a lot of reference back to individual and local history, giving the books depth and feeling almost like a social history of Iceland. I found out that people used to send ‘troubled teens’ to work on farms and that there’s an online Book of Icelanders (not the medieval one) that people consult, presumably so they don’t marry first cousins. Elma uses it to trace people and their families if she has a first name and it’s sufficiently unusual.
I’ve read all six of Eva Bjorg AEgistdottir’s books that Orenda have published in translation, and I really recommend them to anyone who loves a crime novel.
Born in Akranes, Eva Björg Ægisdóttir studied for an MSc in Globalisation in Norway before returning to Iceland and deciding to write a novel. Her debut, The Creak on the Stairs, was published in 2018, becoming a bestseller
in Iceland and going on to win the Blackbird Award and the Storytel Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year. It was published in English by Orenda Books in 2020, and became a number-one bestseller in ebook, shortlisting
for Capital Crime’s Amazon Publishing Awards in two categories, and winning the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger.
Girls Who Lie, Night Shadows, You Can’t See Me and Boys Who Hurt soon followed suit, shortlisting for the CWA Crime in Translation Dagger, the Capital Crime Awards, and the Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel. You Can’t See Me won the Storytel Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year in Iceland in 2023. In 2024, Eva won Iceland’s prestigious Crime Fiction Award, the Blood Drop, for Home before Dark and was shortlisted for the coveted Glass Key.
The Forbidden Iceland series, due to hit streaming services in Autumn 2026 via GlassRiver, has established Eva as one of Iceland’s bestselling and most distinguished crime writers, and her books are published in twenty-nine languages with more than a million copies sold.
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