Blogtour Review - The Murder Pool by Stella Blómkvist

The Murder Pool
Stella Blómkvist (trans Quentin Bates)
Corylus Books, 5 March 2026 
Available as: PB, 296pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781917586252

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

In this latest instalment of the adventures of Stella Blómkvist - Icelandic lawyer and detective - written by Stella Blómkvist - mysterious Icelandic author - the cases come think and fast for Stella.

She’s asked to defend a young man accused of the murder of renowned painter “The Splasher” Kristinn Ófeigsson. Gunnar had been sitting for Ófeigsson who was known for his risqué works depicting scantily dressed young Viking hunks. Now Gunnar is accused of setting about The Splasher with an axe.

In addition to that, Stella is helping out her partner Rannveig, a documentary producer. One of Rannveig's colleagues is putting together an exposé of an abuser with high political connections - and some one seems to be leaning on the broadcaster to squash the story

Then there’s a senior policeman accused of corruption by a colleague with whom Stella’s crossed swords in the past. 

And more besides.

These books are always rapidfire with multiple threads, twists and plenty of plot, but this time, Blómkvist - the author - has, I think, surpassed herself. The result is a busy, even hectic story where nothing stands still for long. All through, it's regularly punctuated by Stella herself with an "Ooof!" when she encounters a setback, discovers something surprising or has an insight. The effect is rather like a series of punches, drumming home an insistent, dramatic rhythm in this enthralling and fast-paced book.

That’s a reflection I think of Stella (the character) herself who has always had many plates juggling. But in this book she not only has crime to address but some chewy personal issues besides, and I began to wonder if it would all be too much. I’ve always felt that the tough talking, wisecracking Stella of the novels might be something of a front for a woman who has things at the back of her mind she’d rather not examine too closely. Overloading herself with work might just be another way to avoid that. Are we seeing Stella on the edge of crisis? 

Maybe. If so, it doesn’t hinder her from tackling her multiple cases. She draws on all the resources she has - her forensic skills, dismantling opponents in the courtroom, her press contacts and her sheer nerve. (Stella even, in one scene, marches into the Prime Minister's office to threaten consequences - a reminder that Iceland is a smaller country where everyone knows everyone, or at least their cousin).

It’s an engaging, dense story that leads back to the prisons of Bangkok and to the Reykjavik underworld, building on events and characters of previous books - nothing in Stella’s world is ever totally done with - to build a picture of rackets and dodgy dealing. Stella B is a brilliant person to have in her corner, and she comes through for her clients. By the end of the book though I thought I saw  change coming for her. As I said, in these books nothing is ever done done.

As with the previous books in the series, Quentin Bates' translation is sharp and pacy, creating excellent readable English while preserving some lumps and bumps in the language (those nicknames?) that show the story's origin in a different language. Great fun to read.

Recommended. I’m eager to see what the next book brings... 

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

Blogtour Review - A Lethal Legacy by Guðrún Gúðlaugsdóttir

A Lethal Legacy
Guðrún Gúðlaugsdóttir (trans Quentin Bates)
Corylus Books, 20 September 2025
Available as: PB, 234pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781917586023

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of A Lethal Legacy to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Nothing has changed at Bjargarlækur for as long as anyone can remember – so are moves to bring change to this remote farm in the Icelandic countryside a motive for murder? Three elderly siblings have lived more or less peacefully in this isolated place their whole lives, until Brynjólfur is found dead in his own bed. Called on to help out at the farm, freelance journalist Alma is far from certain that the old man died a natural death. Determined establish the facts of the matter, she finds herself caught up in a vicious family feud. Sisters Klara and Thórdís are unable to agree on the future of the farm, just as others with an interest in the place circle hungrily around them. Echoes of missed opportunities, lost love and age-old crimes surface as a reckoning takes a bitter toll on those left behind – and Alma struggles to get to the truth.

Journalist Alma and her husband Gunnar have just embarked on renovating the wreck of a house they've bought. However a most dramatic call from daughter Gunnhildur summons Alma away to a remote farmhouse. (One of the minor delights of this novel is how - from off, as it were - Gunnar, left back at home, continually reports to Alma that he's found a new problem - the floor, the windows, the heating - that will require either a tradesman he can't find, materials they hadn't budgeted for, or indeed, a complete change of plan about layout. But he never loses his enthusiasm! It'll all be fine!). Gunnhildur, a nurse who needed some time away from things after splitting from her boyfriend, reports that the elderly man she was caring for alongside his two sisters has been found dead. She worries she may be blamed for mixing up Brynjólfur's meds, and asks her mum to come out and support Gunnhildur and her own toddler daughter Una.

This is Alma's intro to the isolated community at Bjargarlækur. Soon she's in the thick of investigating Brynjólfur's death, partly to help Gunnhildur - though dear Daughter happily scarpers part way through the story as Boyfriend has appeared again - but mostly, one senses, from a prickling of her journalist's thumbs and from sheer burning curiosity.

It's a tangled tale that emerges. The siblings were at war with one another. Brynjólfur and Klara, one of the surviving sisters, wanted to preserve the farm and turn into a museum of old Iceland. In a country that has experienced rapid change one can see why this might be worthwhile. (Another of the joys of A Lethal Legacy is the glimpses of that older Iceland that we get in the stories from the sisters and some of their neighbours. One is left in no doubt how much these remote communities were required to be self-sufficient, and the echoes of that run forward to some extent into the present of the novel, with the police remote and the authorities slow to intervene in the escalating situation).

The other sister, Thórdís, was though dead set against the museum idea. Complicating the picture is the presence of a younger couple to whom the farm has been let, and who may or may not be a pair of ne'er do wells. All sorts of accusations are thrown - Slaughtering the sheep! Selling the cows! Brewing moonshine! Behind them are suspicions they may have their eyes on the place, perhaps in a stitch-up with local authorities.

Once the possibility of murder is added to this mix of family dissension, greed and a gossipy local community - a great deal is to be gleaned from the local priest and the doctor - and Alma's shut in at the lonely, slightly spooky, house - one may well expect almost anything to happen. And there is drama. The sense though that something is rubbing under the surface is an even greater source of tension, the contrast with the bleak, static landscape and the changeless decades that the siblings have lived at Bjargarlækur only adding to this.

Is that impression of calm, of retreat, misleading though? 

At its heart a story of family secrets, A Lethal Legacy manages to be both truly Gothic, with the possibility that not everything going in totally natural, and also a fine, taut crime thriller. Alma's rather out on a limb in conducting any sort of investigation here and she lacks institutional backing to ask questions or poke around, having to rely on the sisters' goodwill (which is in short supply) and her de facto position as their nurse/ carer, to gather facts. 

As she does so it slowly becomes apparent that there is more going on here than you'd expect. With a parallel strand of the story focussing on possible past abuse affecting a member of her own family, and the differing attitudes of the sisters resulting in contradictory accounts of their earlier lives, there's a difficult jigsaw for Alma to assemble. She is, though, nothing if not determined.

I really enjoyed this story. The brooding, remote setting is a fitting location for dark deeds. Klara and Thórdís are magnificent characters, well drawn. Neither is exactly likeable - though by the end of the book one knows enough about them to forgive a lot - but they are a great double act. Alma is determined to reach the truth, at first to protect her daughter, but later, it seems, from sheer bloody-mindedness. And as I've said, the glimpses of Icelandic history and culture are fascinating.

As ever, Quentin Bates' translation sparkles, catching the very different characters of the individuals at the heart of this story through their speech - sometimes slangy and modern, at others more formal or even slightly outdated. He does this while navigating a lot of rather abstruse language describing funeral customs - wakes, lyings-in, funeral meats and such - laying clear subtle differences which matter to Klara and Thórdís. A lot of the background here would be known to the Icelandic reader and so it isn't explicitly set out, but the translation makes clear where everyone is coming from, as it were.

Great fun - and also in some aspects, very sad. I'd recommend this one strongly.

For more information about A Lethal Legacy, 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 A Lethal Legacy from your local high street bookshop or online from Amazon.

#Blogtour #Review - The Dancer by Óskar Guðmundsson

The Dancer

Óskar Guðmundsson (translated by Quentin Bates)
Corylus Books, 5 January 2024 (e), 1 February 2024(pb)
Available as: PB, pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781739298951

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

My review

Óskar Guðmundsson's The Dancer is a police procedural set in Reykjavík in 1982, a departure from present-day Icelandic crime allowing the detectives to be out of touch and unable to email one another (they use faxes instead!)

In many respects it's less a mystery than an exploration of motives and psychology. In a grotesque opening scene, a man is killed. We soon develop a good idea of who carried out the deeply strange crime (and I can't emphasise enough how strange!) but not why, nor how it relates to another death that soon turns up.

The focus turns to a young man, Tony, whose housebound mother is seen in various flashbacks to have been abusive to him. It's not clear whether he's repaying her now, or how Tony's obsession with dancing fits in (I was struck by the way he's able to basically walk into the National Theatre and claim a part in a ballet that's being rehearsed - a nice degree of informality there!) Either way, the relationship between mother and son seems wrong somehow - why is Tony keeping her drugged?

The murders are being investigated by Ylfa, a young detective, and her more experienced boss Valdimar. These two are likeable, down to earth protagonists, but there is less focus on them than on Tony's spiralling problems - while something is made of Ylfa's domestic issues, and Valdimar's health, it felt to me more as though these two were more being set up for future books.  That is fine, because Tony is a complex and involving protagonist, a nuanced character who needs space for the reader to get to know him. I won't pretend I found him easy to like, but he does deserve some sympathy - he has a troubled background and, as we are shown, he's a man who feels something of an outsider. The narrative around him isn't always straightforward - I'm choosing my words with care because I don't want to spoil things, I'll just say that from the founding event that drives the narrative, themes of trust, fraud and self-delusion abound.

All in all a satisfying read, and a very dark one. Quentin Bates's translation does credit to the narrative - I think there must have been some tricky aspects to this (such as the dancing terminology, and the quick shifts from one point of view to another, which leave the reader, for a moment, unsure whether the next scene is a continuation or not) but these are all ably addressed and the English text is great to read.

About the book

Life was never going to be a bed of roses… 

Tony is a young man who has always been on the losing side in life. He was brought up by his troubled, alcoholic mother who had a past of her own as a talented ballerina, until a life-changing accident brought her dreams to a sudden end. As her own ambitions for fame and success were crushed, she used cruel and brutal methods to project them onto her young son – with devastating consequences.

There’s no doubt that a body found on Reykjavík’s Öskjuhlíð hillside has been there for a long time. The case is handed to veteran detective Valdimar, supported by Ylfa, who is taking her tentative first steps as a police officer with the city’s CID while coping with her own family difficulties.

It’s not long before it’s clear a vicious killer is on the loose - and very little about the case is what it appears to be at first glance.

The Dancer was originally published in 2023 as a Storytel Original Series 

About the author

With a unique voice and a style that doesn’t shy away from a sometime graphic take on shocking subject matter, Óskar Guðmundsson is one of the rising stars of the Icelandic crime fiction scene. His debut Hilma was awarded the Icelandic Crime Syndicate’s Drop of Blood award for the best crime novel of 2015, and the TV rights have been acquired by Sagafilm. This was followed by a sequel Blood Angels in 2018. The first of his books published in an English translation, The Commandments, was a standalone novel which appeared in Iceland in 2019. All of Óskar’s books have been bestsellers and rewarded with outstanding reviews. 

The first in a new series of novels The Dancer was published in Icelandic simultaneously as an eBook, audiobook, and paperback - accompanied by an original song in which Óskar’s words have been put to music featuring some of Iceland’s leading musicians - and was an immediate bestseller. Óskar’s talents don’t end there, as he is also an artist and has held a number of exhibitions of his work.

About the translator

Quentin Bates has personal and professional roots in Iceland that go very deep. He is an author of series of nine crime novels and novellas featuring the Reykjavik detective Gunnhildur (Gunna) Gísladóttir. In addition to his own fiction, he has translated many works of Iceland’s coolest writers into English, including books by Lilja Sigurðardóttir, Guðlaugur Arason, Einar Kárason, Óskar Guðmundsson, Sólveig Pálsdóttir, Jónína Leosdottir and Ragnar Jónasson. Quentin was instrumental in launching Iceland Noir in 2013, the crime fiction festival in Reykjavik.

For more information about The Dancer, see the publisher's website here or their Facebook here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Dancer from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#BlogTour #Review - Harm by Solveig Pálsdóttir

Harm (Ice and Crime, 3)
Sólveig Pálsdóttir (Translated from the Icelandic by Quentin Bates)
Corylus Books, 27 August (e), 15 September (PB)
Source: Advance copy
ISBN: 9781916379787

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Harm to consider for review and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Harm takes us back to the world of Guðgeir Fransson and Elsa Guðrún, Reykjavík detectives, who on this occasion are called to the remote Westman Islands where a surgeon has been found dead in suspicious circumstances. Ríkarður Magnússon had recently taken up with a much younger woman, and was on a holiday with her and a group of her friends - people with whom, you'd think, he has very little in common.

The book is unusually written in that, it seems, we know early on what's happened - and the task of the detectives will simply be to uncover the how and the why. And in a sense, we do. Pálsdóttir is scrupulous in following the rules of detective fiction - so that nothing we're shown here about the crime proves to have been a dream or a fiction within the fiction - but at the same time, there is also more here than meets the eye, much more. To begin with, as Guðgeir and Elsa pick their way through the lives and lifestyles of the small group of friends, we see an unexpected side of Iceland - a focus on New Age spirituality and self-discovery, hinted at perhaps one e or twice in earlier books in this series but more fully explored here. It's satisfyingly different from our familiar view of Iceland, now a gleaming land of snow and ice under the Northern Lights, now a dark, noiry place under fun of a volcanic eruption. Rather here we have interior discovery, wellness and spiritual quests.

Diljá, Magnússon's young wife (but don't tell anyone - they're keeping it quiet) stands on the threshold of that realm, a rather sad figure who's lived a difficult life, and the link between many different worlds in this book. She is, or has been, something of an outcast, someone who has found it difficult to make a place in the world for her and her daughter. She won't do well in police custody, we fear.

Then, there's the intricate relationship between Fransson and his wife, daughter, and granddaughter. The book is punctuated by childcare, lost nights of sleep and domestic routines: many of the key conversations take place over meals, either as they are cooked or as they are eaten. 

In a slightly darker vein, we also see the attempts by Guðrún to get her life and career back on track after the traumatic events of Silenced. No spoilers, but you absolutely must read these books in order, starting with The Fox - Fransson now projects a certain degree of calm, but readers of the first book will know that he's also been through trauma For both detectives, that background adds texture and grittiness to the relationships portrayed here, and while Harm is primarily a police procedural with the cops a little more distanced from events than in either of the earlier books knowing the backstory helps to make the main characters truly rounded, involving and human.

That sense of - I don't know, empathy? compassion? - in turn bleeds through to Diljá and her plight. Diljá is in quite a fix. As in the earlier books, Pálsdóttir has a knack for depicting people backed into a corner by society and responding in perhaps unexpected ways. They make mistakes, sometimes bad mistakes, get into trouble. Pálsdóttir's book belie Iceland being a cosy Northern haven, we see the forces of patriarchy at work as well as harsh economic necessity and the invulnerability of powerful men.

Very much a character study and an examination of motivations and consequences, Harm kept the pages on my Kindle humming by and made me hope for more soon about Fransson and Guðrún.

Quentin Bates' translation is clear and idiomatic, well suited to the nuanced storytelling in this book and to conveying the quirks and particularities of the characters.

About the Book

When wealthy doctor Ríkarður Magnússon goes to sleep in his luxurious caravan and doesn’t wake up, detectives Guðgeir Fransson and Elsa Guðrún are called to the Westman Islands to investigate what looks like murder.

Suspicion immediately falls on Ríkharður’s young, beautiful and deeply troubled girlfriend – but there are no easy answers in this case as they are drawn into family feuds, disgruntled friends and colleagues, and the presence of a group of fitness-obsessed over-achievers with secrets of their own.

As their investigation makes progress, Guðgeir and Elsa Guðrún are forced to confront their own preconceptions and prejudices as they uncover the sinister side of Ríkharður’s past.

Harm is the third novel featuring the soft-spoken Reykjavík detective Guðgeir Fransson to appear in English. Sólveig Pálsdóttir again weaves a complex web of intrigue that plays out in the Westman Islands, remote southern Iceland and Reykjavík while asking some searching questions about things society accepts at face value – and others it is not prepared to tolerate.

Sólveig Pálsdóttir

Sólveig Pálsdóttir trained as an actor and has a background in the theatre, television and radio. In a second career she studied for degrees in literature and education, and has taught literature and linguistics, drama and public speaking. She has also produced both radio programming and managed cultural events. Her first novel appeared in Iceland in 2012 and went straight to the country’s bestseller list. She has written six novels featuring Reykjavík detective Guðgeir Fransson, and a memoir Klettaborgin which was a 2020 hit in Iceland. Silenced (Fjötrar) received the 2020 Drop of Blood award for the best Icelandic novel of the year and was Iceland’s nomination for the 2021 Glass Key award for the best Nordic crime novel of the year. Harm (Skaði), published in October 2021 in Iceland, made it to the bestseller list just like the previous books, and is her third novel to appear in English, following The Fox and Silenced.

She has taken part in several crime fiction and literary festivals such as Bristol’s CrimeFest, Newcastle Noir, Aberdeen’s Granite Noir and Iceland Noir. Sólveig lives in Reykjavík.

Quentin Bates

Quentin Bates 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 series of nine crime novels and novellas the Reykjavik detective featuring Gunnhildur (Gunna) Gísladóttir. In addition to writing his own fiction, he has translated books by Lilja Sigurðardóttir, Guðlaugur Arason, Einar Kárason, Óskar Guðmundsson and Ragnar Jónasson. Quentin was instrumental in launching IcelandNoir, the crime fiction festival in Reykjavik.

For more information about Harm, see the other stops on the blogtour,listed on the poster below and also the Corylus Books website here. 

You can buy Harm from your local bookshop, or online from Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Blogtour #Review - The Commandments by Óskar Guðmundsson

The Commandments
Óskar Guðmundsson (trans. by Quentin Bates)
Corylus Books, 29 October 2021
Available as: e-book
Source: Advance copy
ASIN: B09H1GJ323

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of The Commandments to consider for review, and for inviting me to take part in the book's blogtour.

Corylus continues to bring excellent European fiction to readers of English, with The Commandments being the first of Óskar Guðmundsson's novels to be published in English. A standalone featuring former detective Salka Steinsdóttir, home in Iceland from the UK amidst a messy divorce, I can see this kicking off a series if Guðmundsson wants to do that - I would love to find out more about Steinsdóttir, a rather effectively rendered and sympathetic central character, and her background. That said, be prepared for some darkness. The present-day events of The Commandments - a series of gruesome torture-murders - are grim enough, but the history in which they're rooted point to disturbing events in the recent past and, perhaps even worse, to ongoing collusion and collective silence about those events.

The opening of the novel reflects both those strands. After a disturbing intro, set in 1995, we're introduced to Steinsdóttir on a fishing trip, staying near (but not with!) her parents. Guðmundsson makes clear that there is some private trauma or conflict going on - Steinsdóttir's father is ill, but there seems to be more to it than that. Soon, she is approached by the local police, who are short-handed, to help out with the investigation of a cold-blooded and sadistic crime and of course - and fortunately for us! - she eventually agrees. To a degree this all seems very informal - Steinsdóttir has been working with the Met Police in London and apparently has a formidable reputation, and she was in the Icelandic police before, but still, there is an impressive lack of bureaucracy to this appointment (and perhaps, consequent sulking from some of the new colleagues). 

Never mind. The story takes off from here, deftly blending a number of themes. 

There's Steinsdóttir's personal life - she rapidly discovers she rather fancies one of the other cops, although there's still some family background that isn't quite clear, and she seems rather reluctant to sign the divorce papers that a miffed soon to be ex-husband is pressing on her. 

There's the team she's joined, involving both a resentful colleague who clearly wants the interloper gone, a young and keen (but rather inept) officer and the various specialists who fly in and out and who, endearingly,  Steinsdóttir keeps forgetting the names of (I can relate). Overall, we get a vibrant and convincing portrayal of shifting team dynamics without any of the cliches of detective fiction - no unreasonable boss banging the door of his office, no washed-up wrecks of detectives who've given their all to the job and ruined their lives. 

And, of course, there's the mystery itself - the horrific series of murders taking place (will it be possible to stop them, or will the police always be playing catch-up?) and, lurking somewhere behind, the historic crime - it's clear there has been one. Guðmundsson is very good at drawing out the connections between present and past. The damage that can be caused by things that happen to people at a vulnerable age leading to trauma and loss in later life. The more specific ways in which the past can shape the present. The unseen victims. In the frame for much of this is the Church, which it would be fair to say takes a bit of a kicking here. I know very little about the Church in Iceland but (I should declare my interest here as the husband of a Church of England priest) we all know the various historic scandals which have been exposed over the years around the world and so the web of cover-up, looking the other way and plain denial is all too credible.

All in all, The Commandments is a tautly-written (and crisply translated) crime novel with engaging characters and a fair bit of action that unflinchingly takes on a historical scandal. If at times it is a bit condemnatory, well, it's hard to complain about that. 

Whether as a standalone or potentially the start of a series, this left me wanting more from Guðmundsson.

About the Author

One of the rising stars of Icelandic crime fiction, Óskar Guðmundsson has been writing since he was a youngster, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that his novel Hilma was published – and was an immediate success, winning the Drop of Blood award for the best Icelandic crime novel of 2015. This was followed by a sequel, Blood Angels, in 2018.

The first of his books to be published in an English translation, The Commandments is a standalone novel which appeared in Iceland in 2019. All of Óskar’s books have been bestsellers and rewarded with outstanding reviews. The TV rights to Hilma have been acquired by Sagafilm.

His latest book is The Dancer, which has been published simultaneously as an ebook, audiobook and paperback – accompanied by an original song in which Óskar’s words have been put to music featuring some of Iceland’s leading musicians.

Óskar’s talents don’t end there, as he’s also an artist and has held a number of exhibitions of his work.

"Óskar Guðmundsson is the kick-ass breath of fresh air that Icelandic crime fiction has been waiting for" - Yrsa Sigurðardóttir

About the Translator

Quentin Bates has roots in Iceland that go very deep. In addition to writing fiction of his own, he has translated into English books by Lilja Sigurðardóttir, Sólveig Pálsdóttir, Guðlaugur Arason, Einar Kárason, Ragnar Jónasson and others. He is one of the original founders of IcelandNoir crime fiction festival in Reykjavik. 

For more information about The Commandments, see the publisher's website here - and also the stops on the blogtour, listed in the poster below.

 The Commandments is available as an e-book here.

#Blogtour #Review - Little Rebel by Jérôme Leroy

Little Rebel
Jérôme Leroy, trans by Graham Roberts
Corylus Books, 1 July 2021
Available as: e
Source: advance copy provided by the publisher
ASIN: B097KCVCKY

I'm grateful to Corylus Books for an advance copy of Little Rebel to consider for review, and for inviting me to take part in the blog tour.

It's said you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but I think the magnificently dark cover for Little Rebel captures its mood perfectly.

Who, exactly, is to blame for a tragedy, an outrage? The terrorist who pulls the trigger? Those who support, who radicalise, who encourage? Culture warriors who see an opportunity to gain by setting up the Other as threatening, dangerous? Bystanders who don't really care but just want to get on with their complicated lives and don't read the signs? All of us for our prejudices and our little, thoughtless slights?

Leroy's novella sets up all these, and more, in an unnamed port city in Western France. It's a tense place, ruled over by a far-Right administration which has installed cronies in the Police ('Sergeant Richard Garcia, who sees himself these days as a defender of the West against the Great Replacement') yet also with a radical Islamic faction and plenty of simply disaffected youth. Add to that Alizé Lavaux, a jaded author of Young Adult fiction, so very hungover and so very desperate for a smoke, Flavien Dubourg, a twenty seven year old teacher who's still a virgin but fantasises about Alizé, the elusive Little Rebel, a bartender who's about to have a Very Bad Night, and... well, you get a powerful mix.

One of the things I loved about this book was the way it frankly portrays life as messy, as knotted. Leroy is completely cold-blooded - he'll introduce somebody sympathetically and then have them die with little warning. (Or, sometimes, the other way round). Then he'll zoom forward ten, twenty years and show the consequences, what became of the survivors. Both victims and perpetrators are allowed to have rich, complicated, perplexing lives - lives extending into the lives of others, and reflected back in them. It's quite a feat to do that at all, let along in such a short book (I think it took me an hour to read Little Rebel).

There is also the terse, slightly noir-ish tenor to the book, leavened as it by a sense of the absurd and the fatalistic: this is what's going to happen, what can you do? That's accentuated by, as I said, the book's bouncing forward to tell us what eventually happens or, in the authorial voice, assuring the reader that, no, character X won't survive and their story was only there to make a point - about life, about people, about that unnamed city.

It is, as I have said, a short read, but one with some vividly drawn characters and which gives an equally vivid picture of a particular time and place. And it's shot through with dark humour. I'd recommend.

You can buy Little Rebel from Amazon here. To find out more about the book, see the stops on the tour poster below.

#Review - Silenced by Sólveig Pálsdóttir

Silenced (Ice and Crime Book 2)
Sólveig Pálsdóttir (trans by Quentin Bates)
Corylus Books, 15 April 2021
Available as: e-book
Source e: Advance e-copy provided by the publisher

I'm grateful to Corylus Books for providing me with a free advance copy of Silenced to consider for review - and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Silenced follows The Fox, in which we met Guðgeir Fransson, a detective with the Reykjavík police who was under a cloud and waiting for a decision on the future of his career (and also, his marriage). Now Guðgeir is back in Reykjavík and while he's not got his old job back (that role is held by his former protégé Særós) he is playing a useful part in investigations, at the same time as he and his wife move from a house that clearly holds painful memories.

That move brings Guðgeir across the path of Andrea Eythórsdóttir, a young social media influencer (I really enjoyed seeing Guðgeir grapple with that idea!) whose brother vanished twenty years before. Andrea is pretty traumatised by the whole thing and taking to the bottle, and Guðgeir begins to look into the case. He has barely got started however when he's called away to investigate the apparent suicide, in prison, of another young woman - swiftly followed by the first in a series of particularly brutal rapes.

Silenced has, as you'll have gathered, some dark themes. Like The Fox, it exposes patriarchal violence against, and control of, women and a content warning would be in order for the book since there are some frank (though not gratuitous) accounts of what happens. Pálsdóttir expertly weaves together a number of strands: Andrea, who as I have said, is herself troubled; her somewhat haughty family; Kristín, the young woman who died in prison and whose earlier life is seen both in flashbacks and in the words of a friend; and Guðgeir's own life, back on track but about to be upset when his student daughter announces that she is pregnant. I liked the way that Pálsdóttir then has Guðgeir reflect on that - on the extent to which the boyfriend may or may not become involved in parenting, on the childhoods and life chances of the people he meets as part of the investigation, especially the Eythórsdóttir children, and on his own earlier life. There's a sense of Iceland being a small place where paths cross often with different characters having attended the same college at different times, for example, as well as that closeness still allowing goodness knows what to happen in some families, unsuspected by those outside.

In contrast to all this exploration of human nature, I also enjoyed the sense of Guðgeir settling back into a familiar place, in contrast to his life as seen in The Fox where he was out of his element. 

Which only makes it all the more disturbing, of course, when the attacks on women begin to mount and the team need to react and track down the perpetrator. That procedural aspect of the story makes this also an excellent book if seen primarily as a mystery (I did work out what was happening before the end) and I like the fact that, while dealing with very serious crimes, neither this book nor its predecessor give the centrality to murder that one so often finds in crime.  

The translation by Quentin Bates is clear and strikes a good balance between keeping the setting and atmosphere clear - this is obviously Iceland! - and leaving the reader to puzzle over details or references with which they may be unfamiliar. 

An excellent addition to a series that I am looking forward to following.

About the Author

Sólveig Pálsdóttir trained as an actor and has a background in the theatre, television and radio. In a second career she studied for degrees in literature and education, and has taught literature and linguistics, drama and public speaking, and has produced both radio programming and managed cultural events.

Her first novel appeared in Iceland in 2012 and went straight to the country’s bestseller list. She has written five novels featuring Reykjavík detective Guðgeir Fransson and a memoir, Klettaborgin, which was a 2020 hit in Iceland.

Silenced (Fjötrar) received the 2020 Drop of Blood award for the best Icelandic novel of the year and is Iceland’s nomination for the 2021 Glass key award for the best Nordic crime novel of the year.

Sólveig lives in Reykjavík.

For more information about Silenced, see the publisher's website here (including buy links) and the stops on the blogtour, listed on the poster below.

You can also buy Silenced from your local bookshop, or online from Blackwell's, Foyles, Waterstones or Amazon. 

#Blogtour #Review - The Fox by Sólveig Pálsdóttir

The Fox

Sólveig Pálsdóttir (Translated by Quentin Bates)

Corylus Books, December 2020

Available as: PB, 293pp, e

Source: Advance PB copy

ISBN: 9781916379732

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of The Fox to consider for review and for inviting me to take part in the book's blogtour. This is the first tour I've done with them - and I hope the first of many! Corylus is a newly launched publishing house, a brave step to take in 2020 of all years, and I wish them all good things. 

The Fox introduces us to Guðgeir Fransson, a detective with the Reykjavík police who's under some sort of cloud, has been suspended and is waiting for a decision on the future of his career (and also, his marriage). Pálsdóttir only gives us hints of what happened professionally (a colleague and friend died, Guðgeir apparently made a mistake of some sort) and personally (there was an affair, he's estranged from his wife and has decamped to the backwater town of Höfn where he has taken a job as a security guard: the physical distance between him and Inga only seems to a be a barrier to resolving their problems). Guðgeir seems ambivalent about what he wants on either count.

While we shall, I hope, learn more about all this in future books, for now it's mainly background - but it does mean that Guðgeir is restless, poised between two futures and a past: unable to communicate with Inga, unable to commit to a new life and ripe for distraction. He's also a bit of an outsider in Höfn, with no inclination to take things at face value - and so inclined to take notice, when nobody else does, of a mystery on his doorstep.

A young woman, Sajee, originally from Sri Lanka, has been in the area but seems to have disappeared. The circumstances are, however, confused - Sajee arrived by plane from Reykjavík in the midst of a storm but has no connections in Höfn. She was heading for a job that doesn't exist. There is nobody to miss her. Everyone assumes she made her way... somewhere... but it's nobody's business to care whether she did or not. 

Guðgeir has no standing to investigate, and he has to fit his enquiries around his job. He is also hoping to make an Easter visit home. Nevertheless, he takes an interest. 

Pálsdóttir fully exploits the ambiguity of having part of the story follow Guðgeir and part Sajee, but being vague as to whether these strands are simultaneous and indeed, whether everything is being narrated in the order it happens. It would be spoilery to cast too much light on this - but I will say that we do, for much of the story, sort of know what has happened to Sajee, though not, quite, how things end up for her and therefore just how bad it will get. Pálsdóttir introduces a strange, reclusive mother and son - seen from Sagee's point of view - with a rather sinister backstory. It's clear early on that something is a bit off with them, but exactly what is masked by Sajee's unfamiliarity with Icelandic, culture and by tales of a "Hidden People" dwelling in the cliffs and caves. 

We see Sajee try to integrate these stories with both her own culture and the limited amount she knows about Iceland. As a stranger, she's genuinely unsure how much credence to give what she's being told, and so are we. This device - not so much an unreliable narrator as a misinformed one, perhaps - gives the story a real sense of unease and menace, a vacuum in which anything is possible and in which we might anticipate all kinds of bad outcomes. That pressure is kept up to the very end of the book. 

This is a story I sat up with well after midnight, I simply had to know what happened and how things would turn out. It is an impressive debut for Sólveig Pálsdóttir and, as ever, Quentin Bates' translation is lucid, unobtrusive and very readable - without over Anglicising concepts and language.

I will look forward to reading more about Guðgeir Fransson and his circle, assuming that mysterious enquiry absolves him for whatever happened - we will have to wait and see about that!

For more information about The Fox, see Coylus's webpage here, their Facebook or their Instagram. And follow the other entries on the blog tour - see the poster below. There will also be an interview between Dr Noir and Solveig Palsdottir on YouTube from the 10th of December, on the Newcastle Noir YouTube Channel here

You can buy the e-book from Kobo or Amazon. Paperback copies are available directly from the publisher (while stocks last!) - cost is £7.50 + £2.50 P&P for UK, and €8 + €4 P&P for anywhere in Europe, up to the end of December. Email: coryluseditor@gmail.com