[ATDrake]

Finished the entirety thus far of Icelandic author Yrsa Sigur∂ardóttir's Thóra Gudmundsdóttir mystery series, starring a (non-criminal specialty) lawyer in Reykjavík, which I finally started reading the #1 & #3 that I'd purchased on sale while running some errands last week, and ended up picking up the rest from the library while I was getting the rest of Michael Ridpath's Fire & Ice series.

Yrsa Sigur∂ardóttir is apparently known as the "Queen of Icelandic Crime", which puts her on authorial royalty footing with Anne Holt, "Norway's Queen of Crime", and Denise Rudberg, "Queen of Swedish Chick-Lit". It's a well-deserved title; these are really good books.

Lawyer Thóra has a mildly unusual profession, IMHO, since usually when authors with their own non-authorial professional careers write contemporary sleuths with non-police professional careers, they tend to "write what you know". Liza Marklund, Thomas Enger, and Árni Thórarinsson have all been journalists, and write journalistic sleuth heroes; Michael Ridpath used to work in London's financial district and wrote financial thrillers before branching out; and so forth. But the author explained in an interview that there were only so many plausible professions she could set her heroine up with so that she would have a believable chance of regularly running across bodies, given Iceland's rather low 1.3 murders-per-year rate, and forensic stuff required more research than she was up for, and she had a lawyer friend she could consult, so lawyer Thóra it was.

Given said 1.3 murders-per-year rate, most of Thóra's cases end up on her doorstep via indirect means to maintain plausibility while still providing "every year, another dead body" as the Amelia Peabody series puts it: she's asked to look into an old investigation with an eye to potentially re-opening it, or an impromptu dead body shows up while she's involved in negotiating property transfer disputes, and the like. We don't see much in the way of actual lawyer/court stuff, as one would in an actual dedicated legal thriller series, but there's low-key tidbits about working within the Icelandic legal system and co-operating with the local police (and occasionally, jurisdiction things when international parties are involved), which provide for a nice touch. Mostly, Thóra does amateur sleuth-type legwork and tries to figure it all out from there.

As for the obligatory complicated personal life, Thóra is a divorced single mother with an uneasy relationship with her ex, two kids prone to domestic crises, and of course the obligatory love interest, about whom I was Not Sure If Want at first, given how cliché it is to pair up people in the course of an investigation or other, but I grew to actually kind of like their relationship. It helps* that it's being done in a mostly casual way with little romantic relationship drama, and that mostly centred around their being two adults with established personal and professional lives that may prove too incompatible in the long term to sustain an ongoing affair with, rather than consisting of Slap Slap Kiss Kiss bicker-fights which are meant to show how Truly Meant For Each Other they are and wondering about How Much Does X Really Care?!?!, as other series fall prey to. TBH, in the end I was more annoyed with Thóra's kids' tendency to enact dramatic domestic crises in the middle of mom's cases. Don't they know she's trying to solve a murder?

Anyway, I read all 6 to date, and they were all worth it, IMHO, with interestingly varied tales and approaches to telling them, although some were rather better than the others. I like that sometimes Thóra has an investigative partner (and the partner varies by book), and sometimes pretty much works solo, and that the format of the storytelling sometimes alters between books, which keeps the series from seeming too repetitive when one binge-reads them in short succession, as I did.

1. Last Rituals which was a freebie for UK & Europe earlier this year. This sets up Thóra's first investigation and the beginning of her interest in crime-solving, as she's asked to serve as an assistant to handle the Icelandic legal stuff for a German security bank security officer who's looking into the death of the bank-owning family's son, who was a student in Iceland.
   
   This one was a bit like Árni Thórarinsson's Season of the Witch, which I bought and read a couple of years ago and really enjoyed. The premise is that the murdered German student had a significant interest in Iceland's unusual witchcraft traditions (as often, Scandinavia and the World has a topical cartoon for this), and the case is as much about trying to establish the character of the deceased and who he really was inside, versus his external reputation and appearance, as solving the actual whodunnit.
   
   While I think that the narrative fell a little too prey to the cliché that people with notably out-of-the-mainstream interests in controversial esoteric areas are kind of damaged and obsessively weird in a potentially murderous way (as we should have all learned from the Rainbow Cake Comment Apocalypse, perfectly conventional-seeming people can get seriously over-invested in absolutely trivial and utterly mundane stuff, sufficient to try to come to blows), I liked the contrast of personalities between the uptight German security officer (who turns out to have a better sense of humour than initially suspected) and the more laid-back Thóra, and the way that they had to negotiate the language barrier between the security officer and obtaining the information he wanted. A good, solid start to the series, even if there were some uneven patches, and a few things I didn't really care for.
2. My Soul To Take has Thóra looking into a compensation claim for a client who insists that the owners of a property which he's turning into a hotel have failed to mention that it was haunted, thereby making him eligible for a discount on the sale price, since he has to pay extra to his staff to compensate for workplace environment issues. It turns out that's not the only thing wrong with that property, as there's also some sort of secret associated with it that someone would like to keep buried, and acts accordingly.
   
   This had a nice interplay of trendy imported New Age beliefs (it's that sort of hotel) and traditional Icelandic folklore. It's probably the funniest of the books, with nicely humorous interplay between many of the characters, which contrasts with some of the horrible suspected secrets being speculated upon and eventually uncovered. SYKM tells me this was a Shamus finalist for Best Novel in the translated edition (the author also has a bunch of Nordic literary crime prize nods for this series and other books).
3. Ashes to Dust incorporates a bit of Icelandic history in the form of the 1970s volcanic eruption at Heimaey, which led to its becoming the "Pompeii of the North" as the residents hastily evacuated while the authorities tried to get the lava flow under control using experimental techniques (once again, Scandinavia and the World has a has a cartoon for this), leading to a surprising discovery as the long-buried basement of one of Thóra's clients is archaeologically excavated decades later.
   
   Without getting into too much potentially spoilery detail (you get the maximum impact if you go into this one utterly cold, IMHO; I didn't even have a look at the back blurb before starting), this one has an Agatha Christie-worthy level of utterly perfect and fitting misdirection as to who the main culprit really is and why they acted, as well as what really went on with the other stuff all this time (I guessed some of it, which seemed obvious, but that turned out to be mild hide-in-plain-sight not-quite-red herring reveal covering even deeper layers of wrongdoing). Maybe there was a little overly coincidental-feeling contrivance in how a certain piece of important evidence showed up, but to be fair, that sequence was narratively planned for and set up well in advance. I also liked that Thóra had to team up with her legal firm's obligatory terrible unfireable eccentric co-worker, the antagonistic receptionist Bella, who was revealed to have more personality layers and provide actually useful help, while not at all changing her attitude towards her employer.
   
   Probably the best actual mystery case of the lot, and if you only read one, I'd recommend either this or #6.
4. The Day Is Dark, which is set in Greenland, trying to discover what happened to some Icelandic workers on an isolated mining project, who mysteriously disappeared. This had a nicely tense atmosphere as Thóra & company investigating on the behalf of the project-funding bank for the insurance claim and a team of strangers from the mining concern, all hiding secrets, have to visit the site to try to gather clues, kind of like Mulder & Scully in that The Thing-inspired episode of The X-Files, and I rather liked it on that basis.
   
   Some parts of this didn't work for me, namely, the partial narration from the viewpoint of one of the local Greenlandic Inuit characters, which felt a bit too magical native in flavour for my tastes. But, points for trying to depict the varying views of the villagers being encroached upon by the mining, and for providing a reasonably cromulent-looking non-folkloric explanation for the apparent local traditional folkloric curse.
5. Someone To Watch Over Me has Thóra reluctantly taking a case from a thoroughly despicable unreformable criminal who wants her to re-open the investigation for one of his fellow inmates, a mentally disabled man who was convicted for starting a fire which burned down his former residence, which he may actually be innocent of.
   
   This was interesting for the depiction of Thóra's struggle with the ethics of the case, as her client performs a number of questionable actions to arrange access for her to certain persons and materials, and also the treatment of disabled persons in Icelandic society. There's also a secondary storyline involving a woman who seems literally haunted by a hit-and-run accident (not done by her, but which she feels responsible for as the deceased party was out on the road at her behest), and a radio host receiving harassing calls, all of which end up making sense together in the end.
   
   While this is another one which IMHO, didn't feel all quite there in certain ways (admittedly, truth can be stranger than fiction, but it just doesn't ring quite true to me that even a self-absorbed narcissistic sociopath would be quite that self-congratulatory and self-pityingly gloaty in their internal narrative), and I'm not sure the apparently real supernatural elements work for me although they are handled in not-too-intrusive way. But the case within it has a strong depiction, and the differing strands of it mostly weave together cleverly in a way that makes it seem obvious in retrospect from the clues previously dropped which you kick yourself for missing when the reveal is made, and like #4, it otherwise deals with sensitive subject manner in a reasonably respectful way.
6. The Silence of the Sea, probably the most narratively adventurous of the lot, and which the author has said was inspired by the case of the Mary Celeste (Wikipedia), where an abandoned ship was found with no apparent reason for everyone on it to go missing.
   
   This is an excellently tense paired story of what Thóra is uncovering in her efforts to prove some family members probably-dead (and not, like, disappearing for the lulz to set up a shiny new life free of pre-existing debt) so that her financially-challenged clients can put forth a life insurance claim for funds to support their possibly-orphaned young relative, and what actually happened on board the ship, told in interleaving chapters. In an Alfred Hitchcockian sense of mystery being not knowing whether or not there's a bomb under the table and suspense being knowing there's a bomb under the table but not knowing when it's going to go off, this does double duty as both sleuth case mystery and psychological suspense thriller, and does it very well.
   
   We get, piece by piece, the clues that Thóra and others investigating the mysteriously abandoned yacht turn up while trying to figure out what happened. But that doesn't really tell us what went on, so we also get the retrospective viewpoint of the vanished characters as they undergo their journey, showing how certain clues were misread or misinterpreted or simply missed, as well as the increasingly tense and disturbing atmosphere of growing distrust and paranoia among the crew and passengers as certain events occur, and how everything got to the point where they all went missing, which is something that only gets partially explained in the A-storyline.
   
   Anyway, either second-best or co-equal with #3 for best of the lot, depending on what your reading preferences are, allowing for the fact that this has a significant downer ending built-in to the beginning, given the premise. (The B-storyline portions as written would make a perfectly cromulent and high quality "terror on the high seas" psychological suspense thriller in its own right, IMHO, although my judgment may be skewed, since I don't normally read such.)

Very highly recommended, especially for #3 & #6, which I'd consider among "best-of-breed" mystery stories. This is a series that starts off well, and generally gets better, with clever, twisty plots with good character and motivation depth and often portraying a suitably disturbing atmosphere to the crimes (the author also writes standalone psychological and supernatural suspense thrillers). The actual cases are self-contained and further books don't reference the previous ones in that respect, although the ongoing family/relationship dramas build from book to book.

But Thóra's personal life is otherwise pretty stable, and if you don't mind knowing in advance who the love interest is going to be before they meet, or the outcome of a certain domestic crisis which was presented as a major surprise in book #1, you could read these standalone if you've difficulty obtaining or no particular inclination to get the whole series in order.

Also, #1 was a freebie a while back, so if you think you might be interested and got it back then, IMHO it's certainly worth your time to try and see if you like it enough to continue.

* It also helps that they're not above quietly trolling each other for the lulz, without ever really letting on.

One of the funniest sequences in #2 is a repeated joke at the expense of the love interest, based on a deliberate misunderstanding initially perpetuated by Thóra on impulse, which just kind of grows among the hotel staff to hilarious effect, in a way she didn't anticipate; especially as the love interest remains utterly baffled about it all and Thóra maintains, with perfect nitpicking accuracy, that she did not in any way say anything to anyone about the particular thing he thinks she might have said.