✍ Scribed by Yrsa Sigurdardottir
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
At a university in Reykjavík, the body of a young German student is discovered, his eyes cut out and strange symbols carved into his chest. Police waste no time in making an arrest, but the victim's family isn't convinced that the right man is in custody. They ask Thóra Gudmundsdóttir, an attorney and single mother of two, to investigate. It isn't long before Thóra and her associate, Matthew Reich, uncover the deceased student's obsession with Iceland's grisly history of torture, execution, and witch hunts. But there are very contemporary horrors hidden in the long, cold shadow of dark traditions. And for two suddenly endangered investigators, nothing is quite what it seems . . . and no one can be trusted.
Similar in plot to Swedish author Helene Tursten's The Glass Devil, this first in a new series from Icelandic author Sigurdardottir offers little readers have not seen before. As with Tursten's novel, the spectre of demon-worship is at the heart of the mystery, after the strangled corpse of Harald Guntlieb is discovered with his eyes gouged out. Guntlieb, a German student, was attending graduate school in Iceland, examining the latter country's history of witch-hunting, an academic pursuit that may have taken on more personal overtones. His grieving parents, who had already suffered the loss of a child, enlist attorney and single mother Thóra Gudmundsdôttir to objectively assess the police case against a drug addict arrested for the murder. Aided by an attractive ex-German police officer, Gudmundsdôttir diligently tracks down the dead man's friends and colleagues, before arriving at the truth. The author gives less of a sense of her native land than other contemporary Scandinavian crime writers like Karin Fossum, and the identity of the killer will surprise few.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Yrsa SigurdardÓttir is an award-winning author of five children's novels, and her first adult novel, Last Rituals , also featuring ThÓra GudmundsdÓttir. She is currently one of the directors of VerkÍs, one of Iceland's largest engineering firms, and lives with her family in ReykjavÍk.
📜 SIMILAR VOLUMES
A mysterious envelope arrives on Eve McNabb's doorstep soon after she has buried her mother, a woman who kept many secrets. The puzzling letter inside this envelope hints at an illicit passion between the letter writer and Eve's mother, May McNabb. Even when she was a child, Eve sensed that there
EDITORIAL REVIEW: In this timely stand-alone thriller ripped from the headlines, \*New York Times\* bestselling author James Grippando, whom the \*Wall Street Journal\* calls "a writer to watch," explores a world in which the destruction of financial institutions and the people who run them can
EDITORIAL REVIEW: In this timely stand-alone thriller ripped from the headlines, \*New York Times\* bestselling author James Grippando, whom the \*Wall Street Journal\* calls "a writer to watch," explores a world in which the destruction of financial institutions and the people who run them can
In this timely stand-alone thriller ripped from the headlines, New York Times bestselling author James Grippando, whom the Wall Street Journal calls "a writer to watch," explores a world in which the destruction of financial institutions and the people who run them can occur in a matter of hours—per
### From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. At the start of Hayder's superb third crime novel to feature Det. Insp. Jack Caffery (after *The Treatment*), Sgt. Phoebe Flea Marley, a police diver, retrieves a severed hand from Bristol harbor. Without a corpse, the investigation stalls, until fingerpri