Thriller

My favourite Icelandic crime writer’s early novels are inventively gruesome (pins pushed into the feet of the murder victims, anyone?) but always interesting. This one, set in a health retreat that was previously a farmhouse, is no exception. It does however have a particularly bewildering number of characters with confusingly similar names -Birna, Berger, Berta. Trying […]

I didn’t love this one as much as I should have, judging by the rapturous reviews plastered all over the front and back covers. Certainly the author has a remarkable knowledge of and feel for hunting and marsh living. I was however a bit put off by the Helena, the protagonist, and her almost slavish devotion to […]

Three workers disappear, one by one, from an isolated research station in a remote part of Greenland where the locals are inexplicably hostile and secretive – who can resist? Sigurdardottir is a master at creating a creepy atmosphere in her novels, where unsettling events from the past taint the lives of the living. Sigurdardottir’s protagonist lawyer Thora […]

You can’t really beat a surname like Slaughter for a thriller writer, can you? This was my first read of Slaughter, and it’s a good one. Two daughters and their mum are brutally attacked by two men – the mum is killed and the truth of what happened to the daughters slowly emerges over the course […]

I found myself holding my breath for some of this novel, extremely invested in how a thirteen year old girl, Charlie, would get back to her family after being abducted. All the characters are well drawn and believable, each existing in their own orbit of agony after Charlie goes missing. Being inside the head of the […]

The testimonial from Joanna Canon on the front cover states “I couldn’t put it down” but I could – quite easily. This one is a just sufficiently unsettling for you to keep being bothered reading, but it’s thoroughly hampered by the two main female characters. Both drift so passively through their lives that they may as […]

A night time fire in a home for the mentally and physically disabled kills five people and Jakob, a young man with Down’s Syndrome, is deemed responsible and locked away. A convicted paeodophile asks lawyer Thora Gudmundsdottir to see if Jakob has been wrongly convicted, and the plot thickens from there. The beauty in Sigurdardottir’s […]

“That is what you do when you have a child, isn’t it, open yourself up to unimaginable pain and then try to pretend away the possibilities.” You said it, lady. Though fortunately most of us don’t find ourselves trapped inside a zoo with our four year old son, hiding from gunmen and trying to shield […]