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Red As Blood

by Lilja Sigurdardottir (Translated by: Quentin Bates)

 


SYNOPSIS

When entrepreneur Flosi arrives home for dinner one night, he discovers that his house has been ransacked, and his wife Gudrun missing. A letter on the kitchen table confirms that she has been kidnapped. If Flosi doesn’t agree to pay an enormous ransom, Gudrun will be killed.


Forbidden from contracting the police, he gets in touch with Áróra, who specialises in finding hidden assets, and she, alongside her detective friend Daniel, try to get to the bottom of the case without anyone catching on. Meanwhile, Áróra and Daniel continue the puzzling, devastating search for Áróra’s sister Ísafold, who disappeared without trace. As fog descends, in a cold and rainy Icelandic autumn, the investigation becomes increasingly

dangerous, and confusing.


Chilling, twisty and unbearably tense, Red as Blood is the second instalment in the riveting, addictive An Áróra Investigation series, and everything is at stake…


REVIEW


Áróra works as a financial investigator and specialises in finding missing money. When one of her colleagues gets in touch with an urgent request to help out businessman Flosi with a ransom situation, she doesn't hesitate to go and offer her services. Flosi had returned home one evening to find his wife Gudrun missing, a ransom note and instructions to not involve the police if he wanted his wife to live.


While Áróra starts looking into any financial incentives for Gudrun's kidnapping, she discreetly asks her detective friend Daniel to help with all of the other elements of a missing persons case. Working from two completely different angles, Áróra and Daniel start to piece together a picture of what led to Gudrun being abducted, but have they gone down the right path, or have Flosi and his family been lying to them to send them looking in the wrong direction and take the spotlight of themselves as suspects?


What a fantastic follow-up to Cold As Hell! In general I thought that Cold As Hell was the more unusual of the two novels, there was a real mishmash of characters and unexpected strands to the story. This second novel, Red As Blood, had a more typical Nordic Noir style and police investigation, but I loved it just as much and really enjoyed the character development of Áróra, Daniel and also Helena, who plays a much bigger part in this second instalment. Reflecting my thoughts on Áróra's introduction in the first book, I felt that her mixed British and Icelandic heritage was a really interesting way to highlight the cultural differences and add an extra layer to her that we wouldn't normally see in Icelandic Noir.


In terms of the storyline, it seriously played on the dark side of human nature, the complications that can arise from many different types of relationships and our natural instincts to protect the people closest to us. There was a strong emotionally aspect to the investigation and this came across in both the main storyline and in Áróra's continuing search for her sister Ísafold which we learnt about in the first book.


I also want to mention that Quentin Bates did such a fantastic job with the translation. There were a few moments in the book where I actually stopped to read passages again because they were so beautifully written - what an amazing partnership, I am eagerly awaiting book 3!

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Icelandic crime-writer Lilja Sigurdardóttir was born in the town of Akranes in 1972 and raised in Mexico, Sweden, Spain and Iceland. An award-winning

playwright, Lilja has written four crime novels, with Snare, the first in a new series and Lilja’s English debut shortlisting for the CWA International Dagger and hitting bestseller lists worldwide. Trap followed suit, with the third in the trilogy Cage winning the Best Icelandic Crime Novel of the Year, and was a Guardian Book of the Year. Lilja’s standalone Betrayal, was shortlisted for the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel. In 2021, Cold as Hell, the first in the An Áróra Investigation series was published, and now Red as Blood in 2022. Film rights were bought by Palomar Pictures in California. Lilja is also an award-winning screenwriter in her native Iceland. She lives in Reykjavík with her partner.

 

Thanks to Anne Cater - @RandomTTours, Lilja Sigurdardóttir - @lilja1972 and Orenda Books - @OrendaBooks for the opportunity to read and review.

Fiction: Crime / Icelandic Noir

Publisher: Orenda Books

ISBN: 978-1914585326

Pages: 276pp

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