Description After a messy divorce, attractive young mother Sonia is struggling to provide for herself and keep custody of her son. With her back to the wall, she resorts to smuggling cocaine into Iceland, and finds herself caught up in a ruthless criminal world. As she desperately looks for a way out of trouble, she must pit her wits against her nemesis, Bragi, a customs officer, whose years of experience frustrate her new and evermore daring strategies. Things become even more complicated when Sonia embarks on a relationship with a woman, Agla. Once a high-level bank executive, Agla is currently being prosecuted in the aftermath the Icelandic financial crash.
Review
Many thanks to Orenda Books, blog tour organiser Anne Cater and the author for the ARC copy of Snare in return or an honest review.
It has to be said, I adored Snare and for numerous reasons. The outstanding quality of the writing, how the story slowly builds to a thrilling conculsion and the way the characters make you question your own actions if you to where caught in the Snare.
Its a slow burner, where the tension is built carefully. You don’t notice it at first, then suddenly you feel the muscles in your chest begin to tighten, your nerve ends tingle and your gripping your kindle or book so tightly your hands hurt. It has you sitting there literally on the edge of your seat, uncertain if your brave enough to turn the next page.
All the characters are superbly drawn, from Sonia who you initially might find yourself disliking, given she smuggles drugs, but bare with her, I promise she’s is worth it. Then there is Alga who is a deeply troubled character, in love with Sonia, but ashamed of her sexuality and tied up herself in crimes we might find hard to forgive her for. Even Bragi, an essentially good man, who weaves his own snare around Sonia, determined to catch her out. Importantly two LGBT characters are given a central role in a main stream story and weren’t there as background filler, which I adored. It might seem a minor thing, but its still rare for this to happen and I want to applaud Lija Sigurdardottir for the way she gives a voice to characters like Sonia and Alga.
The intracies of the plot line and the subtle way it weaves you the reader into a snare, holding your tight within the narrative is to be celebrated! It’s rare for a book to carefully weave a narrative into your subconcious in such a way you find it hard to move on from it when it’s finished, but Snare does! It’s portrayal of the drug smuggling sub culture that is around us all, even though we don’t partake or are aware of it’s presence it disturbing and worrying. You will look around you when your finished and wonder, who do I know that could be caught in such a snare.
Supberb writing, story telling and a bright new star in Lilja Sigurdardottir.
A special mention must be given to Quentin Bates who’s translation of Snare is flawless. It takes great skill to translate another writer’s work and he derserves to be applauded for capturing the essence of the orginal story and bringing it to a British audience.
You can purchase Snare from Amazon and Waterstones
Author Bio
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, hitting bestseller lists worldwide. The film rights have been bought by Palomar Pictures in California. Lilja has a background in education and has worked in evaluation and quality control for preschools in recent years. She lives in Reykjavík with her partner.
Lilja Sigurdardóttir can be followed on Twitter
Translator Bio
Quentin Bates escaped English suburbia as a teenager, jumping at the chance of a gap year working in Iceland. For a variety of reasons, the gap year stretched to become a gap decade, during which time he went native in the north of Iceland, acquiring a new language, a new profession as a seaman and a family before decamping en masse for England. He worked as a truck driver, teacher, netmaker and trawlerman at various times before falling into journalism largely by accident. He has been the technical editor of a nautical magazine for many years, all the while keeping a close eye on his second home in Iceland, before taking a sidestep into writing fiction. He is the author of a series of crime novels set in present-day Iceland (Frozen Out, Cold Steal, Chilled to the Bone, Winterlude, and Cold Comfort), which have been published in the UK, USA, Germany, Holland, Finland and Poland. He has translated a great deal of news and technical material into English from Icelandic, as well as one novel (Gudlaugur Arason’s Bowline). He’s currently working on translating the next title in Ragnar Jónasson’s Dark Iceland series: Blackout.l
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