#Blogtour #Review - Murder at the Residence by Stella Blómkvist

Murder at the Residence (Translated by Quentin Bates)
Stella Blómkvist
Corylus Books, 28 August 2023
Available as: PB, 266pp, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN: 9781739298920

I'm grateful to Ewa at Corylus Books for sending me a copy of Murder at the Residence to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

I've been eager to share this review, as the book's central character is something of a paradox. 

In the years after the financial crash, as Icelandic society buckles under the political and fiscal strain, lawyer Stella Blómkvist pursues her practice in Reykjavík - in a book written by author Stella Blómkvist, a figure whose identity none has yet deduced, but who seems to move in high circles.

Murder at the Residence certainly appears to reflect a degree of personal knowledge, as author Blómkvist has her protagonist entangled with the murder of a leading financier after a Government reception, with a possible attempted coverup of what looks like dark and murky secrets.

Blómkvist (the lawyer) is an interesting figure. Raising a daughter alone, and pursuing her professional and personal life around nursery drops and family mealtimes, she's fearless, willing to go out on a limb, clashing both with the Reykjavík police (portrayed here as distinctly unreconstructed, happy to crack down on protesters but slow to take action to protect trafficked women) and the city's underworld. All this is against a background of anger at the way Iceland has been impoverished by financiers, and active protests besieging Parliament.

Yet lawyer Blómkvist isn't, perhaps, squeaky clean. She is also preoccupied with the state of the 'Stella Fund', a financial entity that seems to have taken a beating from the the market collapse, and she has her own contacts in Reykjavík's shadier business circles. Those contacts come in useful in resolving the several cases that she deals with in this book. There's the dead financier, a murder that one of her clients is accused of. She's trying to track down a missing young Latvian woman lured into sex work and who may have been spirited out of the country. And she's also searching for the lost daughter of a dying man who wants to make amends. 

I understand that Murder at the Residence is a return for Blómkvist, the character having featured in in an earlier series of books, and the sense of backstory, of a developed character, adds richness to the portrayal here. She is certainly a fascinating and contradictory person, whether haunting the Reykjavík nightclubs looking for fun or tenaciously defending a client. Both aspects of her are used by Blómkvist (the writer) to expose the darker side of Icelandic society (prompting, again, the question of just how much knowledge and experience this story reflects). Quotes from her mother, often cynical ('Time never fails to douse the fires of passion') pepper the text, also suggesting another key relationship about which we know little.

Quentin Bates' assured translation more than does justice to the rapidly unfolding action in this taut and suspenseful story and overall this was a cracking mystery, with a well-drawn and engaging central character, giving a slightly different view of Iceland. I'd strongly recommend it.

About the author and series

Stella Blómkvist has been a bestselling series in Iceland since the first book appeared in the 1990s and has attracted an international audience since the TV series starring Heiða Reed aired. This series features tough, razor-tongued Reykjavík lawyer Stella Blómkvist, with her taste for neat whiskey, a liking for easy money and a moral compass all of her own - and who is at home in the corridors of power as in the city’s darkest nightspots.

The books have been published under a pseudonym that still hasn’t been cracked. The question of Stella Blómkvist’s identity is one that crops up regularly, but it looks like it’s going to remain a mystery…

About the translator

Quentin Bates is a writer, translator and journalist. He has professional and personal roots in Iceland that run very deep. He worked as a seaman before turning to maritime journalism. He is an author of a series of nine crime novels and novellas featuring the Reykjavik detective Gunnhildur (Gunna) Gísladóttir. In addition to writing his own fiction, he has translated books by Guðlaugur Arason, Einar Kárason, and crème de la crème of the Icelandic crime fiction authors Lilja Sigurðardóttir, Óskar Guðmundsson, Jónína Leósdóttir, Sólveig Pálsdóttir and Ragnar Jónasson. Quentin was instrumental in launching IcelandNoir, the crime fiction festival in Reykjavik.

For more information about Murder at the Residence, and to buy the book, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can also order Murder at the Residence from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.