Ah, Yrsa. You never disappoint.
My favourite Nordic crime writer has delivered again. A man is found hanging from a rock with a nail in his chest – so, not suicide then- and a four year old boy who doesn’t know the dead man is found alone in the dead man’s apartment. How? Why? Sigurdardottir is the master of weaving an absorbing narrative that ties everything up neatly at the end.
Gallows Rock is the fourth novel in the Huldar and Freyja series (after The Legacy, The Reckoning and The Absolution). Don’t worry if you haven’t read the first three novels before this one; the characters just muddle their way through in all of them. Hulda is a large and mostly kind police detective who is afraid of commitment and Freyja is a child psychologist with a criminal brother and problems with commitment. Each of the characters – even the bit players- are plausibly flawed and three dimensional. I particularly love the portrayal of Freyja’s young niece – a scowling, pathologically cranky toddler who only smiles at the dog. And the weather in these Icelandic novels is almost a character in itself.
Part thriller, part police procedural, part character study, part meditation on the darkness inside the souls of men (and occasionally, women); Sigurdardottir’s novels have it all. Gallows Rock rocks. 4 stars
