Night Shadows by Eva Bjorg Aegisdottir

The small community of Akranes is devastated when a young man dies in a mysterious house fire, and when Detective Elma and her colleagues from West Iceland CID discover the fire was arson, they become embroiled in an increasingly perplexing case involving multiple suspects. What’s more, the dead man’s final online search raises fears that they could be investigating not one murder, but two.

A few months before the fire, a young Dutch woman takes a job as an au pair in Iceland, desperate to make a new life for herself after the death of her father. But the seemingly perfect family who employs her turns out to have problems of its own and she soon discovers she is running out of people to turn to.

As the police begin to home in on the truth, Elma, already struggling to come to terms with a life-changing event, finds herself in mortal danger as it becomes clear that someone has secrets they’ll do anything to hide…

The small community of Akranes is devastated when a young man dies in a mysterious house fire, and when Detective Elma and her colleagues from West Iceland CID discover the fire was arson, they become embroiled in an increasingly perplexing case involving multiple suspects. What’s more, the dead man’s final online search raises fears that they could be investigating not one murder, but two.

A few months before the fire, a young Dutch woman takes a job as an au pair in Iceland, desperate to make a new life for herself after the death of her father. But the seemingly perfect family who employs her turns out to have problems of its own and she soon discovers she is running out of people to turn to.

As the police begin to home in on the truth, Elma, already struggling to come to terms with a life-changing event, finds herself in mortal danger as it becomes clear that someone has secrets they’ll do anything to hide…

Review

Night Shadows is the third thrilling instalment in the Forbidden Iceland Series; returning the reader to the town of Akranes and Detective Elma. The story revolves around the death of a young man and the mystery of a young girl who seems to have disappeared, provoking a multi angled investigation.

The art of a great thriller is to keep the reader’s undivided attention from the first page to the last, without over playing the tension and ignoring the need for a fabulous story! The beauty of Night Shadows is it does just that. The pace builds beautifully over the story arc with pitch perfect handling of suspense. It feels almost as if the threatening undercurrents that are bubbling under the surface, seep deep it into the soul of the reader, until it is utterly impossible to put the novel down. The writer perfectly judges how much tension to inject at each point, so that the reader feels neither underwhelmed or overwhelmed. Cleverly she switches from scenes in which characters like Detective Elma are discussing life changing events with her sister, to having her literally in danger of losing her very life. This switching seemlesy from quiet family chats to life threatening situations creating a moments for the reader to draw breath, before once again being plunged into Elma’s quest to bring a killer to justice.

It would have been easy for a story with so many characters and so many potential suspects to feel cluttered and unbalanced. In Night Shadows though the writer handles them all beautifully, developing Elma as a character, allowing her to cement herself as one of the best female detectives in a medium so often dominated by males. Her keen intelligence is allowed to unravel a mystery, while coming to terms with change to her own life, that will have consequences in future both in her personal and professional life. I like that she is not a steriotypical hard hitting career women or floating through this story while the men take over the investigation.

The writer weaves two story threads that at first felt to me to be unconnected, but then revealed themselves to become a classical tale of small town intrigue and simmering tensions. Nothing is as it initially seemed and it thrilled me to realise that just as I felt the story had come to an end, the writer left me once again feeling unsettled. So much so that I had to sit up, take a breath and look at each character in a whole new light. She not only managed to deceive me in Night Shadows, she left me wanting more…..

About the author

Born in Akranes in 1988, Eva moved to Trondheim, Norway to study my MSc in Globalisation when she was 25. After moving back home having completed her MSc, she knew it was time to start working on her novel. Eva has wanted to write books since she was 15 years old, having won a short story contest in Iceland.

Eva worked as a stewardess to make ends meet while she wrote her first novel. The book went on to win the Blackbird Award and became an Icelandic bestseller. Eva now lives with her husband and three children in Reykjavík, staying at home with her youngest until she begins Kindergarten.

Translated by

Victoria Cribb studied and worked in Iceland for many years. She has translated more than 25 novels from the Icelandic and, in 2017, she received the Orðstír honourary translation award for services to Icelandic literature.