Stella Blómkvist (trans Quentin Bates)
Corylus Books, 4 July 2025
Available as: PB, 220pp, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781917586016
I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me advance access to an e-copy of Murder Tide to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.
More Stella! One of the highlights of my summer, this new outing for the refreshingly unconventional Icelandic lawyer, and for her pseudonymous author, lived up to expectations. Stella - the lawyer - is thrown into a slew of cases which have her questioning her life choices and thinking of the future (and not just of the health of the Stella Fund). Stella - the author - has great fun putting her alter ego through the wringer, and misdirecting the readers.
Case 1. A prominent financier and politician is found drowned (the especially grisly drowning predicted by a psychic, who insists on sharing her visions with an annoyed Stella). The accused is a fisherman who lost his quota and trawler in the financial crisis and blames the dead "quota baron" for doing him down.
Case 2. A figure from Stella's past, a man she helped to put away for drug smuggling, now seeks her help to get him off serious charges.
Case 3. A young woman whose mother lodged sensitive family papers with Stella, turns up to claim them. Úlfhildur wants to know who her father is. This gets Stella ruminating about her own daughter and whether she ought to be able to track down her dad...
Behind these cases, a complex web of family relationships and wrongs - imagined and actual - to be unpicked.
Peppered throughout with the aphorisms and hard-earned wisdom of Stella's mum, Murder Tide is a fast moving and, at times, shocking, slice of Icelandic noir. One of Stella's cases will touch on organised crime and set formidable enemies on her trail. Another will expose a charlatan preacher who's in no hurry have his past laid bare. Politics, corruption and racketeering lurk in every shady corner - and danger too.
I thought this book brought us a much more reflective and sober (well, kind of sober!) Stella than in the previous two books in this series. She now has much to lose - not only her kid, Sóley Árdís, but her lover Rannveig. I sensed Stella regrets that now there are people she loves, her enemies have new ways to pressure her. Accustomed to sailing close to the line in her legal practice, and to bearing danger as she does so, Stella now faces new vulnerabilities. She may, even, whisper it, be growing up.
That doesn't, though, dampen her fighting spirit. Murder Tide is a book in which Stella has to use every trick, call in every favour, work every contact and be ever on her guard against the mysterious - yet also, hidden in plain sight - opponents with whom she's engaged.
Not all of them are where you'd expect.
And some are not above switching sides.
It makes for a switchback of a novel, a book where the battle lines are blurred and all is shades of grey. That's always been true of these novels of course but I think the evolution of Stella's personal life has raised the stakes here, as well as the dangers she faces. It's a short book, but one that is packed with incident and where the outcome is on a knife edge to the very end. Entertaining, mysterious and great, great fun to read.
As ever Quentin Bates' translation captures every nuance and tone in this twisty book, giving the different characters their due and sketching their place in Icelandic society without it sounding as though that's peopled by English types! It's unobtrusive but lucid, conveying the plot perfectly.
With a major plot thread left fizzing away, I am CERTAIN there will be a book 4 to follow soon and I can't wait for it.
For more information about Murder Tide, 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 buy Murder Tide from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith or Waterstones.
