Two Out of Three

Snare
by Lilja Sigurðardóttir
Translated by Quentin Bates
London: Orenda Books, 2017

A pair of Icelandic crime-thrillers today.

Lilja Sigurðardóttir (sister of Yrsa?) is a new ripple in the wave of Scandinavian crime-fiction writers. Her writing is definitely in the Elmore Leonard vein—taut, no nonsense, and to the point. Sonja, a single mother in Reykjavík, becomes enmeshed with a smuggling group that includes her estranged husband who is trying to wrest all parental rights away from her. Sonja also has a love interest in Agla, a woman being prosecuted in the aftermath of the 2008 Icelandic economic meltdown. Sonja also enters in a economic relationship with Bragi, an aging customs inspector who is willing to turn a blind eye to make some cash to help take care of his ailing wife. All of this leads into the next book:

Trap
by Lilja Sigurðardóttir
Translated by Quentin Bates
London: Orenda Books, 2018

Taking up where Snare left off, Trap gives us the further adventures of Sonja and Agla, as both the smuggling and financial capers ratchet up in intensity. The mastermind of the smuggling ring, Mr. José, takes a special interest in Sonja, and Agla plans the biggest fraud yet to cover-up the smaller ones that she had been perpetuating. All of this is well and good, although the money laundering schemes are fairly abstruse and the smuggling incidents begin to lose appeal after the third or fourth iteration. There is also a third book in the series, Cage, which has just been released. It leaves the drug smuggling behind and focuses on the banking shenanigans. I might skip that one.

The translator for all three of these books is Quentin Bates, who is also a writer of Icelandic crime fiction. It is a serviceable translation but, like the rest of Bates’ work, unexceptional.