17 July 2025

Blogtour review - Home Before Dark by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir

Home Before Dark 
Eva Björg Ægisdóttir (trans Victoria Cribb)
Orenda Books, 17 July 2025
Available as: HB, 300pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781916788602

I'm grateful to Orenda for sending me a copy of Home Before Dark to consider for review, and to Anne for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

In this new standalone psychological crime novel, Eva Björg Ægisdóttir introduces us to troubled Marsí. In 1977, Marsí dreads the tenth anniversary of her older sister, Stína, disappearing into the Icelandic night. 

Marsí has always blamed herself for Stína's loss, because 14 year old Marsí, was conducting an illicit correspondence with a penpal - using Stína's name.

And on the night Stína vanished, Marsí had arranged to meet him...

The first thing to say about this novel is that - as the title hints - it is dark, dark, dark. The setting is almost gothic, the isolated town, and the even more isolated farmstead where Marsí's family still live, breathing suppressed secrets and decades old grief. Marsí's dad makes his living by farming hens, the miserable lives of the poor creatures in their close confinement adding suffering from which she shrinks, and her mum sits in the house drinking alone, mourning her lost career as an actress.

Marsí has her own problems - not all related to the trauma and guilt of losing her sister - and Ægisdóttir cleverly cuts between events of 1966/ 67 (seen from the perspective of each sister), and Marsí's life in 1977. She clearly has an eating disorder, something that goes unremarked in the 70s. Sometimes the two girls' accounts support each other, sometimes they contradict each other significantly. Add in that 70s Marsí is either misremembering, is imagining things, or is a very unreliable narrator indeed, and it's clear that Home Before Dark is a real puzzle box of a book, a story where nothing can be taken for granted and events need to be reconstructed, almost forensically.

All this, and Marsí begins receiving letters again from her former penpal, who now threatens to become her stalker.

I really enjoyed Home Before Dark. It's miles from the typical Icelandic crime mystery (not that I've anything against those!) in that here the investigation of the crime isn't the central thread of the story. Yes, Marsí does make a new attempt here to discover what happened in 1967. (Of course, everyone tells her to leave well alone). And - spoiler! - she does eventually succeed. And that has... consequences. But really, it's her journey to this knowledge - and the re animation of a whole series of relationships (friendships and enmities) from her teenage years, as well as the stirring of long buried family skeletons, that drive the story. Marsí herself emerges as a brilliantly portrayed character, at once very dislikable but also, ion her affliction and desperation, very vulnerable. I changed my mind more times about whether I found her sympathetic than in any book I've read for a long time. 

In best gothic fashion, Home Before Dark shows us one family tragedy, but hints at more. As we will eventually learn, behind the apparent catastrophe there are complex family dynamics and unhealed wounds. While the atmosphere of darkness grows, the detail is only revealed slowly, with plenty of time to get to know Marsí, Stína and their (rather strange) parents and circle of teenage friends (seen both in the 60s and, more grown up, later). Ægisdóttir also shows us bits of Icelandic history that are not normally explored in a contemporary crime novel. Some are just intriguing - like that fact that even in the 70s TV shut down on Thursday. Others are darker and look back to a more patriarchal, decidedly unmodern Iceland.

Though it all, Victoria Cribb's excellent translation captures mood and nuance, matching the gathering tension and keeping all the distinct voices clear and recognisable, with their idiosyncrasies and different identities.

 An excellent book, and a great escape from the current UK heatwave!

For more information about Home Before Dark, 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 Home Before Dark from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith or Waterstones.



3 July 2025

Review - Behind Frenemy Lines by Zen Cho

Behind Frenemy Lines
Zen Cho
Pam Macmillan, 3 July 2025 
Available as: PB, 320pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(PB): 9781035046102

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Behind Frenemy Lines to consider for review.

Taking place in the same setting - the world of London business and law and its Asian diaspora community - Behind Frenemy Lines references some of the same characters and events as Cho's previous book, The Friend Zone Experiment, although it is somewhat less focussed on the gathering corruption scandal which that book introduced and feels more personal in tone. 

Behind Frenemy Lines introduces Kriya, a young lawyer, first seen when she wakes late and rushes to a car crash of an interview for a training place, literally falling at the feet of a man, Charles, who she keeps meeting over the next few years, always - in her mind - embarrassingly. (But why would she care about embarrassing herself in front of a man she's decided to write off as an enemy?)

Told in alternate, and often amusing, chapters alternating between Kriya's and Charles' perspectives, Behind Frenemy Lines gives us two distinct voices and styles, illuminating the personalities of two very different protagonists. Charles' sections are synoptic, missing out words and detail and commenting drily on events, as though for a diary. Kriya's are warmer, filled at times with horror at events as she finds herself unexpectedly sharing an office with her "Nemesis". At times they're rawer, though, as she encounters difficulties with a colleague and faces the fragility of her position at the firm. 

Both narrators describe their challenges and conflicts at work, with their extended families (Charles's wastrel of a father tapping him for money) and in their personal lives (Kriya's smarting after being dumped by her ex) - which seem somewhat blighted by the long hours of a London law firm (the canteen stays open till 10pm, though you'll be working longer than that if you're really under pressure to meet a deadline). Families and friends enter the stage, social events throwing the hapless two together like a much more grounded version of Four Weddings. Gradually Cho fills in detail for the pair, such as Charles's circle and their fandoms or Kriya's close dependency, even as part of a large form, on a particular partner who seems to have a very old fashioned and almost patriarchal view of things.

It's a warm, funny, generous book with pages that just fly by, the attraction between Kriya and Charles threaded through every enthralling page. There are, naturally, crises and difficulties to be overcome and, equally naturally, the reader is generally a step or two ahead of the pair, it's fun to see them catch up. All  in all, I greatly enjoyed Behind Frenemy Lines and will be eager for whatever Zen Cho writes next.

For more information about Behind Frenemy Lines, see the publisher's website here.

1 July 2025

Blogtour Review - Murder Tide by Stella Blómkvist

Muder Tide (Stella Blómkvist, 3)
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.