Snow Day

Flippist World Headquarters, April 14, 2018

I try not to talk about the weather here on FITK, but this is ridiculous. Last weekend an inch of sleet was followed by a foot of snow (with more on the way). In other words, a perfect excuse to curl up with a Nordic thriller. Fortunately, this spring storm did not deter my faithful postman who delivered, through a raging snowstorm, the Icelandic mystery novel Why Did You Lie? by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir.

As far as I know, this is her newest book in the US market. There are newer ones but in UK only release. Yrsa keeps getting better in both her series novels and the stand-alones. This is one of the latter group, a story with three overlapping and parallel time-lines: a trio of maintenance workers and a photographer are helicoptered to a remote lighthouse on a tiny crag on the Icelandic coast, a grieving policewoman is assigned to a make-work job in the department’s archive, and a couple and their son return from a trip to Florida to their house that had been occupied by an American couple in a house-swap arrangement.

From the beginning, nothing is quite “right”, yet for a long time there is no hard evidence that any crimes have been committed. Like her previous novels, Yrsa likes to stretch out the exposition. She has a good eye for the mundane, giving commonplace items a sinister significance. This trick is used in the service of a fairly complex plot that left me guessing until the final “wow” of a denouement. The Icelandic setting is more pronounced here than in some of her other work and the psychology of the characters is definitely filtered through a Icelandic sensibility.  Victoria Cribb’s translation is first-rate. I read a preview copy intended for a UK audience and while it was a bit “English” in its idioms, they weren’t enough to detract from the over-all reading experience.

Highest recommendation.