by Stella Blómkvist (T. Quentin Bates)
SYNOPSIS
What does a woman do when her husband's charged with the frenzied killing of her father and her best friend? She calls in Stella Blomkvist to to investigate - however unwelcome the truth could turn out to be. Smart, ruthless and with a flexible moral code all of her own, razor-tongued lawyer Stella Blomkvist is also dealing with a desperate deathbed request to track down a young woman who vanished a decade ago. It looks like a dead end, but she agrees to pick up the stone-cold trail - and she never gives up, even if the police did a long time ago. Then there's the mystery behind the arm that emerges from an ice cap, with a mysterious ruby ring on one frozen finger? How does this connect to another unexplained disappearance, and why were the police at the time so keen to write it off as a tragic accident? Brutal present-day crimes have their roots in the past that some people would prefer to stay forgotten. As Stella pieces together the fragments, is she getting too close to the truth and making herself a target for ruthless men determined to conceal secret sins?
REVIEW
I have been waiting so long to read from/about the mysterious Stella Blomkvist and with so much mystery surrounding the author (plus the interesting meta aspect of the story) I really wasn't sure what to expect, but I didn't need to worry. Within two or three pages I was all-in and completely engrossed in the case of the missing young woman Julia. The story evolves quite a bit from just a simple missing person investigation and has some political elements, but the missing person elements are always my favourite. I love the deep dive into their background and lead up to how they disappeared, going through all of the case documents to try and find out if any angle or aspect was missed. Plus, having a lawyer investigate was actually a really interesting twist. Usually a missing person would have a detective or sometimes a PI involved but I really liked the idea that with the Police having no leads and basically giving up on the search, Stella is the first choice to restart the search. I didn't have to read much before I found out why! - Stella as the main protagonist is just brilliant. She does whatever she wants to do no matter what the consequences might be, and this does lead to some tricky moments!
Iceland as usual is the perfect setting for a mystery. It's isolated enough that a case like this can be really complicated to solve, but there's also a lot of interesting characters and relatable relationships and situations. The thing that stood out to me the most though was the pacing of the story. It's a reasonably short novel and I absolutely flew through it. It was so readable, there was always something important going on, never a chance to lose concentration at all. I'll give a lot of the credit for this to Quentin Bates for an absolutely flawless translation filled with dark humour. I will definitely be going back to read Book 1 - Murder at the Residence, and am very excited to continue with this unique series.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stella Blomkvist has been a bestselling series in Iceland since the first book appeared in the 1990s, and has attracted an international audience since the TV series starring Heida Reed aired. The books have been published under a pseudonym that still hasn't been cracked. The question of Stella Blomkvist's identity is one that crops up regularly, but it looks like it's going to remain a mystery...
Thanks to Corylus Books @CorylusB - Ewa Sherman @sh_ewa for the opportunity to read and review.
Fiction: Icelandic Noir / Crime
ISBN: 978-1739298944
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