When the skeletons of a young woman and a baby are uncovered on a long-abandoned farm in Hvalfjörður, it is clear they were buried years apart. West Iceland CID begins to investigate the disturbing discovery, aware that someone has gone to great lengths to keep the past hidden.
In Akranes, Karitas, a young single mother seeking a new start, settles in with her four-year-old son and rents a basement flat from an eccentric landlord. A cautious sense of happiness returns when she meets the boy next door.
But when news breaks that a local girl has been murdered, Karitas must decide who she can trust, knowing that one wrong choice could place her and her child in danger. Detective Elma is drawn into the case, forced to navigate long-hidden family secrets to understand a killer’s motive, while struggling to hold together her increasingly troubled relationship with Sævar.
Born in Akranes, Eva Björg Ægisdóttir studied for an MSc in Globalisation in Norway before returning to Iceland and deciding to write a novel.
Her debut, The Creak on the Stairs, was published in 2018, becoming a bestseller in Iceland and going on to win the Blackbird Award and the Storytel Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year. It was published in English by Orenda Books in 2020, and became a number-one bestseller in ebook, shortlisting for Capital Crime’s Amazon Publishing Awards in two categories, and winning the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger.
Girls Who Lie, Night Shadows, You Can’t See Me and Boys Who Hurt soon followed suit, shortlisting for the CWA Crime in Translation Dagger, the Capital Crime Awards, and the Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel. You Can’t See Me won the Storyteller Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year in Iceland in 2023. In 2024, Eva won Iceland’s prestigious Crime Fiction Award, the Blood Drop, for Home before Dark and was shortlisted for the coveted Glass Key.
The Forbidden Iceland series, due to hit streaming services in Autumn 2026 via GlassRiver, has established Eva as one of Iceland’s bestselling and most distinguished crime writers, and her books are published in twenty-nine languages with more than a million copies sold.
My thoughts: This creeped me out a bit, especially when Karitas thinks someone has been in her flat while she’s out but she can’t prove it, and feels paranoid – that’s something I would not cope with, too many TV shows and books about someone living in your house without you knowing.
But it is a creepy story – the missing woman who spent time in the basement flat, the slightly weird (but ultimately quite sweet) old man upstairs, the next door neighbours who are definitely not right, the baby found buried in the old barn not far from the missing woman.
And it’s complicated, no one has lived at the farm in years, the people who worked there are hard to trace as there’s only nicknames to go on in some cases, the trace DNA evidence that throws uncertainty on the identities of the remains.
However, it is so well written, so compelling it completely hooks you and draws you in. I felt for Karitas and her little son, and for their landlord, who was clearly still mourning his lost family, both lost souls in need of support and found family.
This series is so, so good, you need to get into it if you love crime fiction, smart, but really human, detectives and cases that make you go 😮
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 