Mystery told through events

The last book by Yrsa Sigurdardóttir that I read was ponderous, mostly because the narrator told the story ponderously.

This new one, The Silence of the Sea, hooked me at the beginning and kept me going through the whole plot. It begins when a luxury yacht sails into the harbor in Reykjavik, Iceland. It had come from Spain. It crashes into a jetty in the harbor. No one is aboard the ship.

Well, what happened to the crew? And to the passengers? An Icelandic bank had repossessed the yacht. A banker who had gone to Spain to do the repossession paperwork was bringing his family (wife and two daughters) home on the yacht.

Yrsa tells the story through a series of flashbacks during the cruise. The flashbacks are mostly told from the banker's point of view, but there are other people's flashbacks too.

Meanwhile in Reykjavik, rumors circulate about a curse on the yacht and its owners. Lawyer Thóra Gudmundsdóttir is hired by the banker's father to sort out the legalities and liabilities. The closest thing to a living helper is a sailor who was supposed to be on the crew, but who broke a leg just before the ship sailed. He's actually less help than Thóra hoped for.

Oh, and then there's the problem of the boat's owner who has either gone missing or flown to Brazil to avoid bankruptcy. Well, that's what people thought until her body washes up on an Icelandic shore. And the owner's personal maid, has also disappeared. Then the partial body of one of the yacht's crew comes ashore in Iceland.

The story is nicely complicated and resolution seems as ghostly as the spirit that has been seen on the yacht.

Not to worry, Yrsa wraps the story up in an inventive and surprising way. It was a good book and a great antidote to the previous book (Someone to Watch Over Me).

Have you read The Silence of the Sea? What did you think of it? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

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• Publisher's web site
• Brief reviews at GoodReads
• Brief reviews at Waterstones (UK)
• Nelson Appell's review at emissourian

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Thriller waiting to happen

Yrsa

I have to write about the Yrsa Sigurðardóttir book I read a couple weeks ago. Nancy got it for me at the library, I had to renew it, and now it's due again. I did have things to say about it when I finished it, but I've forgotten most of what I wanted to say about The Day is Dark.

It seems that the first thing I have to say about the book is that it was forgettable. That's not new, since I forget about most of the books I read. One of the reasons I began publishing the newsletter Reading, 25 or so years ago was to help me remember what I'd read.

As I look at the book cover, I see that it's labeled as "a thriller." I remember something now. It's not a thriller. There are certainly plenty of settings and opportunities for thrills in a tiny native fishing village in eastern Greenland. The reclusive residents could be seen as mysterious and threatening. The abandoned mining camp outside of the village offers plenty of empty buildings, complicated survival technology, and snowy wilderness. Add to that the reputation the area has of being haunted, the fleeting sightings of an unknown person outside the mining camp HQ, the missing people, and you have lots of ingredients for a thriller.

Fishing village in eastern Greenland

But, Yrsa doesn't manipulate those things in order to instill fear and anxiety in the reader. I can imagine her characters were fearful, but I don't think many readers will be. Her characters, including the Icelandic lawyer Þhóra Guðmundsdóttir (transliterated as Thora Gudmundsdottir), are too busy keeping the generators working, the heat on, and puzzling over the skeleton found scattered in various desk drawers in the main office and the body found in the kitchen freezer. Oh, and they're looking for clues to the disappearance of two of the mining crew. As described by Yrsa, the investigators flown in from Iceland don't have time to be scared. The only anxiety I had was about when the impending threat was going to cause great peril.

The mystery is an interesting one. The story is well-told, but it's not a thriller. Maybe there's an Icelandic word that translates to "thriller," but which has a different meaning in the original.

I also had very picky (and probably unfair) nits to pick about the description of the isolated and self-sufficient mining camp in the wilderness. I'm one of the very few people outside of Australia who reads the newsletter and looks at the webcam from an Aussie research station in Antarctica. [Mawson Station newsletter. Mawson Station webcam.] So I have a somewhat informed image of how an isolated, self-sufficient community operates, sociologically and mechanically. Yrsa's mining camp wasn't cut off from the outside world for most of the year, like the Aussies at Mawson, and the Greenland operation was commercial, but there were things she described that didn't quite ring true. Sarah Andrews spent time in Antarctica on an NSF Antarctic Artists and Writers fellowship to get things right for her mystery, In Cold Pursuit. Yrsa's story might have benefitted from an extended visit to an eastern Greenland mining camp.

All that is minor. The story is a good one. The telling of the story is well-done. It was a great diversion for a few days back in June. Check it out if it's in your library.

Have you read The Day is Dark? How did you react? Write. Tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

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• Jane Jakeman's review in The Independent
• Jen's review at Jen's Book Thoughts
• Laura DeMarco's review at the Cleveland Plain Dealer

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Volcanic ash covers a crime scene

I found Yrsa Sigurðardóttir's book, Ashes to Dust, A Thriller, on the "new books" shelf at the Northfield Library. I had vague memories of reading Last Rituals a couple years ago and checked out this newer book.

Yrsa signing books

As I noted before, Icelanders are part of a country small enough to dispense with family names most of the time. In her books, most of Yrsa's characters are identified by first names only. As her books get translated, globalization proceeds, and Yrsa publicizes herself on Facebook, she adds her family name. And she adds family names to some of her characters. (However, her lover from Last Rituals is still only the German lawyer Matthew.)

I noted that the title on this dust jacket seems to include a PR person's sales pitch that Ashes to Dust is "A Thriller." Last Rituals was labeled "A Novel of Suspense, but lacked much suspense. Ashes to Dust is not thrilling. In fact, it's anything but exciting. It's interesting. The story is well told. It's about the investigation of a forty-year-old multiple murder and a contemporary murder that might be connected. What kept me reading was not the pursuit of thrills, but curiosity about what chain of events was going to explain the discovery of three bodies and a severed head in the basement of a house covered by volcanic ash in 1973, and whether or how a 2010 murder is related to the earlier crimes. In the back of my mind I kept wondering when something thrilling might happen. But the thrills never came.

There were opportunities. The bodies had been discovered by archaeologists excavating some of the houses buried by the volcanic eruption. Thóra and her assistant prowl around the basement in the dark. They meet with tough-looking sailors on a dock in the dark. They take an aimless tourist cruise as the only two passengers in order to talk to a shady sailor. There are opportunities for thrills, but none are taken.

Nor did I feel any emotional attachment to the characters. Some of them were interesting. Most were just there. The motivations of several of the key players didn't make much sense or weren't explained very well. Students of Stanislavsky and Strasberg would have a terrible time portraying these characters without a lot of imaginative work. Too bad that Yrsa didn't do more of that work.

So no thrills. No emotions. An intellectual puzzle well told, but only partly explained (sounds terribly Scandinavian). Attorney Thóra once again does nearly all the detective work. It seems the Icelandic cops, especially the small town guys, are too overworked to pursue clues — even in a murder investigation. Thóra's love interest is offstage and considering a job offer in Reykjavik, but she isn't sure how to encourage him without seeming too needy. (Even that bit of emotion gets stuffed.)

I enjoyed the puzzle and the way that Yrsa revealed the pieces of it. It wasn't riveting.

Have you read Ashes to Dust? How did you react? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

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• The publisher's web page for Yrsa Sigurðardóttir
• Jake Kerridge interviews Yrsa and describes Ashes to Dust in The Telegraph (UK)
• Leslie Gilbert Elman's review at Criminal Element
• Karen Meek's review at EuroCrime

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Sunday, the library is closed

Already we suffer from reduced public spending. The Northfield library used to be open on Sunday afternoons in the winter. No more.

So, when I came home on Saturday wtih a book I'd already read and didn't want to reread, I was stuck.

What it meant was a 35-mile ride to the nearest bookstore. It was a nice Sunday afternoon. Driving the Prius meant I used less than 2 gallons of gas for the round trip. Still, it was a luxury I would think more than twice about after writing checks today for income taxes. (Tom Paxton, at the time of the first auto industry bail out, wrote a song, "I'm Changing My Name to Chrysler." Later he updated the song to "I am Changing My Name to Fannie Mae.") Today, I want to change my name to GE. I don't want any of its billions in profits. I just want to avoid paying taxes on my income like it did.

Back in the halcyon days before I saw our tax returns, I made the drive to the bookstore and came home with several books. One of the was A Test of Wills, that I wrote about a couple weeks ago. Another was Last Rituals by Yrsa. Yrsa is another of the Icelanders who usually do without a family name. When publishers outside of Iceland demand a second name, she gets her revenge by saying, "I'm Yrsa Sigurðardóttir." (Go ahead try and write or type that one.) It's so difficult that her publisher transliterates her name into Yrsa Sigurdardóttir.

Enough about Icelandic names.

The cover of the book says that Last Rituals is "A Novel of Suspense." An unnamed USA Today reviewer was more accurate when describing the book as a "fascinating and deliciously creepy mystery." The closest to suspense I could identify was what was wrong with the main character's teen age son or how long would it take for the divorced Icelandic lawyer, Thóra Gudmundsdóttir (Þóra Guðmundsdóttir) to get into bed with the gorgeous German guy who was directing the investigation.

No suspense, but definitely creepy. And sort of fascinating. The story is strung out like a trail of breadcrumbs behind Hansel and Gretel. One thing leads to another and another. Sometimes the trail is a dead end, but if you haven't eaten the breadcrumbs, it's possible to get back to the main route.

Yrsa writes well and translator Bernard Scudder does a great job of putting things into casual and correct English. Thóra and the German factotum talk to each other and to the people involved in a grisly murder. The dialogue moves the plot along very well (I've noted that before; for me it's usually much better than straight story telling most of the time.)

The victim was the son of a wealthy German family researching Medieval witch burnings in Iceland. His death seems as symbolic and horrifying as the persecutions he was studying. Matthew, a representative of the German family, needs help understanding Iclandic and Iceland. Thóra is an attorney who could use the generous fee offered by the family. Besides, she's a quick study and smart. The local police are on the fringe of things, but pretty much quit investigating when they're satisfied that their suspect is guilty.

So, no suspense. If there was any suspense, it happened in the back story. Lots of creepyness. Not very delicious. But it's a well-told story. Several of the characters are interesting. Ysra has written a couple more novels about Thóra, and I'll be looking for them in the library. (Buying books is on hold for awhile.)

Have you read Last Rituals or another of Yrsa's novels? Did you like it? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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• Yrsa's Facebook page
  
• The publisher's web page
  
• Maxine Clarke's review at EuroCrime
  
• Karen Russel's review at How Mysterious!

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