Review by Eygló Svala Arnarsdóttir.

Yrsa Sigurdardóttir’s My Soul to Take (Icelandic title: Sér grefur gröf), originally published by Veröld in Reykjavík in 2006, is a brilliantly-written crime novel of nightmarish proportions with a carefully-woven plot, much better than Aska, the novel’s independent sequel.

Think Agatha Christie: A remote countryside hotel, a mysterious murder and everyone is a suspect. Even towards the end you have no idea who did it until the detective, or the person playing detective, unravels the mystery with his or her shrewdness.

However, unlike Christie’s novels, the murders in Sigurdardóttir’s books are far from “tasteful” and the person playing detective, Thóra the lawyer, has her own demons to overcome. Whatever happened to the blissfully simple Miss Marples and Hercule Poirots of crime novels, who were only preoccupied with solving a crime and not their own personal problems?

Sometimes the problems facing the main characters of modern crime novels are semi-interesting, such as the problems of Arnaldur Indridason’s Erlendur, whose brother disappeared in a snowstorm in their youth. But Thóra’s life is just boring.

I really don’t need to read about her divorce, her annoying ex-husband, her financial problems, her trouble-making kids or the child Thóra’s teenage son has fathered. I also couldn’t care less about her romance with some German guy. However, Thóra’s character is more interesting in My Soul to Take than in Aska. The subplots are woven more eloquently into the main storyline.

That aside, My Soul to Take is a thrilling read. This is a book that is hard to put down. It contains so many elements that keep readers glued to the pages: Horrible and haunting events from the past, the remote and supposedly peaceful hotel with the beautiful surroundings (the hotel is located on Snaefellsnes peninsula and all the while I kept imagining Hótel Búdir), a heartbreaking accident, an abundance of suspicious characters, sex, drugs, Nazis and even ghosts.

The novel contains references to actual places on Snaefellsnes, which is informative geographically speaking, but it lacks more graphic descriptions of the surroundings, which really are so versatile and breathtaking that no one should be at a loss for words to describe them. Some of the main characters could also use more detailed descriptions to round them out.

Yrsa Sigurdardóttir is a truly talented writer; her debut crime novel Last Rituals (2007), originally published in Iceland as Thridja táknid in 2005, has been translated to 25 languages and proven a hit all around the world. But since writing is not her main profession, it sometimes feels as if she isn’t able to nurture this talent as much as it deserves.

Although My Soul to Take generated some points of criticism on my behalf, they are more an afterthought than something I constantly reflected on while reading. It is the kind of story that makes people focus on trying to solve the plot and piece together the extremely complicated puzzle of a story.

And as is the case with any good crime novel, all the pieces fit nicely together in the end with no loose threads.

My Soul to Take was recently released in English in a translation by Bernard Scudder and Anna Yates. The book is available on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.

ESA – eyglo@icelandreview.com