I love the Nordic Noir genre of novels and Iceland, a country I have visited, provides perfect settings for crime thrillers.
A young woman is found dead on a remote Icelandic beach. She came looking for safety but instead she found a watery graave. A hasty police investigation determines her death as suicide. When Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir of the Reykjavik police is forced into early retirement, she is told she can investigate one last cold case of her choice - and she knows which one.
What she discovers is far darker than suicide . . . And no one is telling Hulda the whole story.
When her own colleagues try to put the brakes on her investigation, Hulda has just days to discover the truth. A truth she will risk her own life to find.
A neatly plotted thriller with a striking end. Read more about this book and the author in a review written by a fellow fan of Nordic Noir:
https://www.on-magazine.co.uk/arts/book-review/crime/the-darkness-ragnar-jonasson/
Our House by Louise Candlish
Suggested by Liz of Splinter this turned out to be an archetypal page-turner, and much more.
On a bright morning in the London suburbs, you see a family move into
the house they’ve just bought on Trinity Avenue. Nothing strange about that. Except it's your
house. And you didn’t sell it.
Amazon says:
When Fi Lawson arrives home to find strangers
moving into her house, she is plunged into confusion. She and her husband Bram
have owned their home on Trinity Avenue for years and have no intention of
selling. How can this other family possibly think the house is theirs? And why
has Bram disappeared when she needs him most?
Unable to see his wife, his children or his home, he has nothing left
but to settle scores. As the nightmare takes grip, both Bram and Fi try to make
sense of the events that led to a devastating crime. What has he hidden from
her – and what has she hidden from him? And will
either survive the chilling truth – that there are far worse things you can
lose than your house?
What I thought:
It is a bit of a nightmare scenario,
I think any house-owning reader will relate to that.A day and a half in bed nursing some
sort of virus enabled me to read Our House pretty much from cover to cover because this was a page-turner
where you would promise to finish at the end of the chapter and then think,
I’ll just read one more……
The plot is ingenious and I’m not
sure there is another novel in this genre which comes close to matching the series
of events that leads up to the moment when Fi arrives home to find her home is
no longer her own.
The plot is plausible with twists and
turns which never stray beyond the realms of the believable and the
coincidental. It hinges around the
arrogance of a man who thinks he can ignore a driving ban and continue to drive
with excess alcohol in his system to boot.
One cover up leads to another and in the end Bram and Fi are both guilty
of believing they can get away with ‘murder’.
Bram makes that initial mistake which
will have such unfolding and catastrophic consequences and he must then pay the
price. So, the irony in the final
paragraph……. Bram still goes on thinking he can make it right and in doing so
seals his wife’s fate.
A true page-turner and I would
not be surprised to see it made into a film.