Review 2334: Murder at the Residence

In my search for a Scandinavian mystery series that I want to keep following, I decided to try to read a novel by Stella Blómkvist, especially as it is set in Iceland. Much to my initial confusion, I found that the main character of the novel is also named Stella Blómkvist. I wondered whether I was reading true crime or another mystery series that features the author as a character only to find that Stella is the nom de plume of an anonymous author whose sex is even unknown.

On New Years Eve 2009, Stella has an unpleasant encounter with some thuggish young police academy students that leads to her meeting a Latvian prostitute named Dagnija. When Dagnija learns that Stella is a lawyer, she asks her to find her friend Ilona, who has been missing since she left a party the two were attending.

Stella also takes a case from an old man named Hákon Hákonarson, whose dying wish is that Stella find a woman he believes is his daughter.

Iceland is in chaos because of corruption in the government, banking system, and police. Demonstrators are practically living outside the legislature. But everyone is shocked when a fat cat financier is murdered in a church across from the president’s residence where a major reception is in progress. It is Stella herself, arriving to attend a christening, who finds the body of financier Benedikt Björgúlfsson beaten to death.

Within a few days, Stella is assigned to defend a drug addict named Sverrir Guðbjartsson. He has been charged with the murder of Benedikt on the basis of the police having found candlesticks used to beat him under Sverrir’s bed after a tip-off. Sverrir says he was at the church sleeping in the back seat of a friend’s car but did not go into the church. Oddly, the CTV footage that would show whether he left the car seems to be unavailable.

Finally, Stella is requested by a drug mule named Robertas who claims just to have been delivering a car. He says he had no idea it was stuffed with drugs.

The novel skips around among these cases, some of which are connected. Frankly, so many names are mentioned that I kept losing track of who was who, particularly as characterization doesn’t seem to be a strong suit of Blómkvist’s.

Stella is a salty, libidinous personality. I don’t mind sharp-tongued heroines, but I don’t think Stella is a convincing character. I have lots of reasons for believing there is no way the author is a woman or at very least is someone who has no knowledge of children. Stella has a daughter who is conveniently only mentioned as an afterthought and is apparently perfectly behaved and never wants any attention. It is hard to tell how old she is, but I actually thought she was an infant because of what Stella said about her until she suddenly spoke at the end of the novel.

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Review 2294: Hotel Silence

Jónas Ebeneser has begun to think his life has no meaning. His wife Gúdrun has divorced him, and recently she told him his daughter Gúdrun Waterlily isn’t his. Aside from getting a lily tattooed on his chest, hanging out with his neighbor, and visiting his senile mother, he hasn’t been doing much, except fixing things, which he is good at.

He decides to kill himself, but he is worried that Gúdrun Waterlily will find his body. So, he decides to travel to a dangerous foreign country, feeling sure he can find a way to die. He travels to an unnamed country where a war has just finished, taking a shirt, his tool box, and his old diaries, and checks into Hotel Silence, formerly occupied by the famous and now run down with three guests.

This quietly quirky novel is another joy from Ólafsdóttir. It’s at times serious and sad but full of hope.

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Review 2247: Girls Who Lie

Boys discover a body hidden in a cave on a lava flow. It’s quickly established that it’s the body of Marianna, a woman who has been missing for seven months and has been presumed to have committed suicide. But Marianna was murdered.

When officers Elma and Sævar investigate, they find that Marianna has had periods when her daughter, Hekla, was removed from her care. Now, things seem to be going well, but 15-year-old Hekla spends a lot of time with her foster parents.

Interspersed in the novel is a narrative by a woman containing at times disturbing information. But we don’t know who this narrator is. Is it Marianna or someone else?

This is the second book in this series featuring Elma (last name? first name? Ægisdottir seems always to use just one for all her characters). I have mixed feelings about the series. The plotting is fairly good, and the novel ends in a chilling way. However, the dialogue seems unconvincing, and characterization is minimal. This is the same way I felt about Camilla Lackberg’s novels, so it’s hard to know whether it’s a translation problem (the dialogue, I mean) or the author’s writing ability. I don’t think I’ll be sticking with this series.

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Review 2163: All the Horses of Iceland

In the 12th century, Jór tells the story of how Eyvind of Eyri traveled to Central Asia three centuries before, bringing back horses that formed the stock for the horses of Iceland.

Eyvind is a trader who joins up with a band of Khazar traders on their way to Khazaria. When he sees the small, fiery horses of Central Asia, he decides to try to buy some to take back to Iceland. He is helped in these goals by his encounters with a ghost who is haunting the people of a qan.

This beautiful little novella is told in the style of myth about a time of cultural change. It is poetically written and really lovely.

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Review 2159: Miss Iceland

I was so entranced by Miss Iceland that I ended up reading it all in one day.

It’s 1963, and Hekla is leaving home at 21 to go live in Reykjavik and become a writer. She has plans to stay with her best friend Jón John Johnsson, while he is at sea, and she also has another friend there, Ísey, a young mother.

Hekla gets a job waitressing in a hotel restaurant, but when middle-aged men try to grope her, she is told to put up with it. One man repeatedly tries to get her to enter a Miss Iceland competition. She is not interested but later learns that another girl who entered was raped by one of the presenters. She really only wants to write, read, and visit her friends.

She loves Jón John, but he is gay, and apparently 1960s Iceland is no place for a gay man. He brings her clothes from Hull and dreams of escape.

Ísey also has ambitions to be a writer and fears that she will only have more children. Soon, she is pregnant again.

Hekla finds that in Iceland, poets are men. She gets a boyfriend, Starkadur, who is a poet and works in a library. She hides from him that she is a published poet, and when she asks about Mokka, the café where the poets hang out, she is told they don’t welcome girlfriends. When Starkadur finds out she is not only a poet but more gifted than he is, he begins obsessing and can no longer write. Still, he wants to marry her and buys her a cookbook for Christmas.

I can’t really describe what was so fascinating about this book. Hekla herself is quite detached, although not from her friends. I think it was because the story seemed real, not at all contrived. The ending is a little abrupt and unexpected, but I liked the story and wanted there to be more. The novel explores friendship, the urge to create, and the search for self-expression. It’s both delicate and powerful.

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Review 2112: The Creak on the Stairs

Chief Investigating Officer Elma, who has been with the police in Rejkyavik, moves back to her home town of Akranes after an end to a long relationship. Almost as soon as she arrives, there’s an unusual death—a woman’s body is found in the sea by an old lighthouse. Suicide and accident seem ruled out because the body was dragged there from the parking lot.

The body is identified as Elisabet Hölludóttir, a woman who had lived in Akranes as a child but was said to hate it. The investigators have difficulty finding out much about her, and even her husband seems to know little about her past.

The team’s investigation of the present doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, but Elma becomes convinced that the murder has to do with Elisabet’s past. Her boss, Hörþur, doesn’t agree.

I am fairly sure The Creak on the Stairs is Ægisdóttir’s first book, and in some ways it shows. I found Hörþur’s behavior at times unbelievable, for example. Ægisdóttir seems to be trying to depict him as lackadaisical and too close to the community bigwigs, but in a country where murder is so unusual, there’s no way he would tell his staff to hold their progress reports until the next day because he needs to make a phone call or that he would go home early. Also, a woman refuses to go to the town where she was a child and then is found dead there. Of course the murder has to do with her past. It took them too long to get there.

Other than that, I found the novel interesting enough and liked the heroine. A surprise at the end of the novel made me think Elma was getting interested in her partner too soon, though.

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Review 2102: My Soul To Take

A quote on the cover of My Soul To Take says that it is chilling, but apart from its grim subject matter, it is actually surprisingly light. Conversations and the tone of the second Thóra Gudmundsdóttir novel are often quite jokey.

In 1945, a man drops a small child into a freezing coal bunker to die. From a nearby farmhouse, someone sees him.

In the present time, lawyer Thóra Gudmundsdóttir is contacted by her client Jónas Júlíusson, who has just built a New Age hotel from a remodeled farmhouse on the Snaefellsnes peninsula. He wants her to look into whether he can claim damages from the previous owners because of ghosts on the property. Thóra reluctantly agrees to come to the hotel to investigate.

Shortly after Thóra arrives there, Birna, the project’s architect, is found brutally beaten and raped on the beach. Thóra thinks that Birna was investigating something about the property. In any case, Thóra finds herself looking into her case because Jónas is a suspect. Thóra’s German friend Matthew, with whom she began a romance in the previous novel, joins her there. Just when it’s possible that the police might have believed the murder is unconnected with the hotel, another body turns up, that of the hotel aura reader.

As I said, this novel is surprisingly light in tone. Even more surprisingly is how it deals with Thóra’s children, who seem to be there only for light comic relief. Thóra’s 16-year-old son has made his girlfriend pregnant, and Thóra has left them and her younger daughter with her ex-husband. But she learns mid-case that her son, who doesn’t have a driver’s license, has left with his sister and pregnant girlfriend to drive to Thóra. On learning this, Thóra does nothing for several hours and then tells her ex where to pick them up. When, surprise, surprise, the children arrive the next day, Thóra basically ignores them. They have no apparent personalities except silliness and disobedience. It’s hard to understand why Sigurdardóttir even decided to make Thóra a mother.

One more very picky thing. At the opening of the novel, Thóra is dealing with a client who is having a dispute with the post office because the mail slot in his door is at the wrong height. The story is he bought a kit house from the States. But I’ve never seen a door for sale here with a mail slot already in it., and most people in the U. S. have mail boxes, either attached to the house or at the street. You seem to only see slots in old city neighborhoods on old doors. This just seems like an oddly wrong detail for her to have come up with.

I enjoyed the first book in this series but don’t think I’ll bother with the third.

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Review 1877: Gallows Rock

When I purchased Gallows Rock, for some reason I thought I was getting the second book in Sigurdardóttir’s Thóra Gudmundsdóttir series, but it was actually the fourth book in the Freyja and Huldar series. Oh well.

The body of a man is found hanging at a rock that was historically used for executions. Assuming it’s a suicide, the authorities just want the body removed as quickly as possible, because the Chinese delegation that is soon to arrive will be able to see it across the bay. No one can get up to release the knot, so the body is brought down rather haphazardly. Then they realize the death is not a suicide—the deceased has had a piece of paper stapled to his chest, although only a scrap of paper is still there.

It takes a while to identify the body as Helgi, a wealthy man who works in securities. While the police are struggling with that, Freyja, apparently some sort of social worker, is called to an apartment because a four-year-old boy is reported to have been left there alone. This apartment turns out to belong to Helgi, but the police can’t figure out who the child is. Once they finally identify him, they can’t figure out the connection between the boy and Helgi. In addition, his parents are missing.

Although this mystery is fairly complex, it’s the type that doesn’t provide enough clues for readers to figure it out. It focuses more on the police procedural aspect, even though it gives us enough glimpses into the doings of Helgi’s friends for us to know that something else is going on.

I felt that this novel seemed much less polished than the other Sigurdardóttir novel I read. It takes quite a while for the police to make any progress in their investigation. The characters aren’t very fully developed, perhaps because this has been done in previous books. But my main criticism has to do with the number of explanations of things that are probably self-explanatory, and the sheer number of details that have to be explained at the end, including things that haven’t been discussed before so no one really cares about. There was something clumsy in this.

The novel does have a final surprise, but even that is explained to death instead of being punched in to greater effect.

Finally, this is very picky and it’s not clear to me if it is a writing or a translation problem, but there is a lot of outdated slang, and one case where the word “verdict” is used incorrectly by the police, which I can’t imagine them doing.

Freyja’s link to the story is very weak. She’s essentially babysitting for most of the novel. As for Huldar, he’s such an appeaser at work that his behavior verges on the unprofessional.

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Review 1834: Last Rituals

Thóra Gudmundsdóttir, a Reykyavik attorney, receives an unusual request. A German university student has been found murdered under unusual circumstances, and his family isn’t satisfied with the police investigation. Although the murderer has supposedly been arrested, the family doesn’t think he did it. They want Thóra to work with their German representative, Matthew Reich, to see what she can turn up.

Thóra soon learns that the student, Harald Gottlieb, was obsessed with Medieval witch hunts. His apartment is decorated with bizarre artifacts from his grandfather’s collection of torture instruments and folk spells. His own body is covered with piercings and markings as well as embedded objects. His thesis is supposed to be a comparison of witch burnings in Germany and Iceland, but Thóra and Matthew find his research more scattered.

Despite his appearance and apparently rowdy behavior, Harald seems to have been well-liked by his fellow students although not by all the faculty. He has founded a historical society centered around witchcraft practices, and the members of it all give each other alibis for the night of the murder—they were all out clubbing together.

Although because of its macabre subject matter and occasional creepiness, this mystery seems as if it is going to be fairly grim, I would place it closer to the cozy category. We get to know Thóra’s kids and find a source of humor in Thóra’s surly receptionist Bella (although I thought Sigurdardóttir could have skipped the fat jokes). Also interesting is Thóra’s growing relationship with Matthew.

This is a pretty good mystery, too. I enjoyed this novel and will look for the next one.

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Review 1724: The Mist

Here’s another book for RIP XVI.

I didn’t realize until just now that The Mist is the third book in a trilogy. Having not read the other two books, I’m not sure how much it would have affected my reading if I had read them.

Detective Hulda Hermannsdóttir is back at her desk after a traumatic experience. She is having trouble focusing, however, on the case of a missing young woman. Then she is called out of the office to investigate bodies found on a remote farm in the east of Iceland.

The story goes back three months to show what happened to Hulda and on the farm. Erla and her husband Einar are snowbound at the farm just before Christmas when a mysterious man appears at their door, claiming to be separated from his friends on a hiking trip. Erla is immediately suspicious of him, and he certainly acts suspiciously. But Einar invites him to stay until the snowstorm stops.

This novel is complicated and at times suspenseful, but I had some problems with it. First, it’s obvious almost immediately what’s wrong with Hulda’s teenage daughter. Second, most of the action of the novel is triggered when a character receives a letter. The next obvious step would have been for him to take it to the police, whom he is already working with. But does he? Of course not. There wouldn’t be much of a story if he did, but novelists should avoid such silly pitfalls.

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