Yrsa SigurdardottirLast Rituals: A Novel of Suspense (Thora Gudmundsdottir Novels, 1)

It's easy to read this novel, the story is captivating. Sometimes I got a feeling that the author rushed while creating the scenes. Most of the book is suspense and you never know what is coming next, but in some places, you get the feeling that it's just rushed so the story can bridge that and move on.

I used to read Nordic Noir quite a bit. Last Rituals is my first in a long time and I found nothing special in it. Noir for sure, a complex and gruesome mystery is methodically unraveled. A bizarre seemingly ritualistic murder of a equally bizarre young man unites attorney Thora Gudmndsdottir and a family friend of the deceased Harald to find the killer. As reconstruction of Harald’s activities in Iceland proceed, horrific details of the torture of witches in 16th century Iceland and Germany, black magic, and creepy spells are uncovered along with body mutilation in the methodical though repetitive and at timesboring investigation. The backstory of Thora’s private life add filler to the book and, I suppose, some insight into her uninteresting character but add little interest. The final revealing of the killer and the epilogue lack credulity. I don’t regret reading it as the complexity of the plot is worth it.Three stars is the best I can offer.

I am a fan of Scandinavian thrillers/police procedurals and have enjoyed all the works of Karin Fossum (such as  The Indian Bride (Inspector Sejer Mysteries)  and  Black Seconds (An Inspector Sejer Mystery) ), Arnaldur Indridason's  The Draining Lake: A Thriller (Reykjavik Thriller) , and recently Johan Theorin's  The Darkest Room: A Novel  and  Echoes from the Dead . There are many other Scandinavian authors that are also good such as Asa Larssen, Stieg Larssen, Mari Jungstedt, Henning Mankell, and so on. When I came across the two translated works by Icelandic author Yrsa Sigurdardottir, I thought I'd give them a try."Last Rituals" has an interesting premise - recently divorced, single mom Thora Gudmundsdottir finds herself in a financial pickle as she struggles to pay the bills and provide for her two children, 16-year-old son Gylfi and a young daughter. Though she works as a partner in a law firm, the practice is small and not a financial success. So, when a certain Frau Guntlieb from Germany calls upon Thora's services with the promise of lucrative fees, Thora's interest in piqued. She is asked to help investigate the circumstances surrounding Harald Guntlieb's murder (Frau Guntlieb's son), a grad student at the local university who was found killed with both his eyes plucked out (interestingly, the eyes are nowhere to be found). Thora is assisted in her efforts by investigator Matthew Reich (who works for the Guntlieb family). The pair start off with a certain amount of animosity on Thora's part, but the relationship gradually thaws out. As the pair investigate Harald's life and his inner circle of friends, Thora also has to deal with some domestic issues surrounding her son.The story itself is interesting, and the secret life of Harald Guntlieb makes for fascinating reading - especially the themes of witchcraft, occult, etc. However, the novel reads like some sort of academic treatise on the subject - numerous pages are devoted to descriptions of Harald's field of interest, and facts about medieval torture, witchcraft, etc. which bogged down the pace of the story. This is not a fast-paced novel of suspense, but a very slowly simmering whodunit which takes such a long time setting the premise that it almost lost my interest. I only persevered because of the rather interesting plot and also because after plodding through the first half of the novel, I just had to discover how everything turns out. The slow way in which the story unfolds may also be attributed to translation problems - this novel is translated from the Icelandic, and though I'm not familiar with the language, the novel does read rather awkwardly, sounding stilted in many places. I do not find this to be the case with the Swedish procedurals which have been translated into English.On the whole, I would say this is an intriguing investigative mystery for its subject matter, but poorly paced, and plodding for the most part. I am still going to give Ms. Sigurdardottir's other novel a try to see if there's an improvement, but I would certainly recommend the works of authors mentioned at the beginning of this review over this.

Last Rituals opens with Thora facing Christmas coming with a bank account in need of CPR when she recieves a call from the mother of a murder asking Thora to investigate her son's death. Thora doesn't want to take the case, but with her law office struggling to pay the bills, she feels she has no choice. Thora soon meets with family representative Matthew Reich and the sparks begin to fly. This novel is a real page turner as Thora and Matthew investigate the last few days of the murder victim's life. There is a wonderful sense of being in Iceland with all its beauty and freezing temperatures. Surprisingly, there is humor sprinkled throughout the book to offset some of the macabre details of Last Rituals. The budding romance between Thora and Matthew was an added bonus. Hopefully, the reader will not have long to wait before the sequel to this book, "My Soul To Take", is published. To anyone who enjoys a Nordic mystery, I say "Highly Recommended"!

The head of the History Department at the University in Reykjavik is shocked enough when he opens a cupboard in his room early one morning only for a corpse to tumble out and land on him. But when it turns out the corpse is one of the department’s students and has been gruesomely mutilated, his shock, and that of the cleaning staff who run to his aid, turns to horror. Harald Guntlieb was a young German student specialising in the history of German witch trials who had come to Reykjavik on a student exchange programme to make a comparative study of how witches had been treated in Iceland. Highly intelligent, but troubled and strange, Harald was also delving into the subject of witchcraft and sorcery, and the combination of his wealth and odd charisma had gathered around him a little group of friends who shared his fascination for the subject. When the autopsy shows that he has had a magic symbol carved into his chest, it seems that his death may be connected to his interest in sorcery.The police quickly decide on a suspect – a drug dealer who kept Harald and his friends well supplied – and charge him with the crime. But Harald’s parents don’t believe they’ve got the right person, and hire local lawyer Thóra Gudmundsdóttir to work with their own security man, a German called Matthew Reich, to investigate the murder on their behalf.Despite the mutilations and the subject of witchcraft and witch trials, this isn’t nearly as grim and dark as that little blurb makes it sound. Sigurdardóttir doesn’t shy away from the gruesome bits, but nor does she dwell on them unduly. The result is that the book is shivery rather than disturbing. It’s written in the third person, past tense, although told firmly from Thóra’s perspective throughout, and there’s a lot of humour in the growing relationship of Thóra and Matthew to keep the overall tone light. Sigurdardóttir also manages to pack in a load of history about the Icelandic Reformation and resulting witch trials without it feeling too much like an info dump – for the most part she keeps it focused on what is needed for the plot and she works it through the story interestingly.Thóra is a likeable main character. She’s in her late thirties, with two children – a boy of 16 and a girl of 6 – whom she shares with her ex-husband, though she has main custody. Despite being busy with a full-time job and the stresses of single parenthood, she’s delightfully angst-free. She doesn’t regret her divorce nor seem particularly bitter over it, and now, two years on, she’s beginning to think it might be nice to have a romantic life again. At work she has a partner who really doesn’t appear much in this one, and a truly dreadful secretary, Bella, whom they can’t sack because she’s the daughter of their landlord. Bella also adds to the humour, though I must admit it didn’t take long for that joke to wear thin, and by the end of the book I was finding her tiresome as a character. Matthew starts out as rather cold and serious, but he warms up quickly and becomes a fun sparring partner for Thóra. Their banter is done very well and meant that their inevitable romantic attraction felt credible – quick, yes, but not the dreaded instalove!The investigation mainly centres around Harald’s friends, and they’re a rather unpleasant bunch. Academic ambition plays its part too, and Sigurdardóttir gives a good picture of the lengths historians might go to in pursuit of a piece of evidence to back their pet theory, or sometimes for fame and fortune. As the story progresses we learn more about Harald’s family and childhood, and that casts some light on his character flaws. The plot itself is complex, and I felt that it occasionally got a little too convoluted. Unless I missed some fairly major clues, I’d have to say it’s not fair play and it seemed to me the solution came out of the blue quite abruptly at the end. That aspect is probably the book’s one weakness, but the rest of it was so enjoyable that it didn’t bother me too much.I’ve had a mixed reaction to Sigurdardóttir in the past – I always admire her writing and style, but sometimes she gets too dark and graphic for me. This is the second Thóra book I’ve read, the other being much later in the series, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed them both – they seem to me to be at the lighter end of Sigurdardóttir’s range and that suits me perfectly. I look forward to reading more in the series. 4½ stars for me, so rounded up.

Last Rituals introduces the character of Thóra Gudmunsdóttir, a recently divorced lawyer and partner in a small firm that specialises in contractual law. Thirty-six-year-old Thóra, mother to son Gylfi, sixteen and six-year-old daughter Sóley has an acrimonious relationship with her ex-husband and children’s father, Hannes. Two years divorced, she works hard both at work and at home, to create a supportive and stable environment for her offspring, whilst allowing her own love life to take a backseat. Despite her lack of investigative experience, an unexpected phone call from the mother of a German student, Harald Guntlieb, recently found murdered whilst studying in Reykjavík and requesting her assistance piques her interest, but it is far from clear cut just what will be required of her. Although Thóra doesn’t hold out much hope of providing assistance, she is interested in taking the commission due to both company business being in the doldrums and the generous financial compensation, not least a chance to focus on something less dry than the finer points of law contracts!Amelia Guntlieb has been given Thóra’s name by a professor whom she studied under whilst in Berlin, and the women's clinical detachment and haughty telephone manner does nothing to make Thóra warm to her. The gist of Frau Guntlieb’s rather cryptic message is that she and her husband do not believe that the police have the right man in custody and facing prosecution for the murder of their twenty-seven-year-old son, Harald. Despite the arrest of a petty drug dealer and known associate of Harald’s after only three days of investigative work they suspect that he is not the culprit and his arrest has allowed the police to merely conduct a superficial investigation. Agreeing to look into the matter impartially and make the Icelandic end of investigations more apparent to the Guntlieb family she is thrust into a uncomfortable partnership with an frosty employee of the wealthy family and a man with twelve years in the Munich CID, Matthew Reich. But firstly he has to answer several pressing questions for Thóra, namely how can the family be so sure that the petty drug dealer, Hugi Thórisson, is not the murderer of their son? His shocking reply is that Thórisson did not have the gouged out eyes of Harald in his possession or amongst his personal effects. Given access to the apprehended man by his lawyer, Finnur Bogason, who understands that they could hold the key to vindicating his clients name and armed with a dossier on Harald’s life the awkward duo seek to shed some light on the case. They quickly find themselves drawn into Harald’s dark world, his esoteric pursuits and his fascination for black magic. With the autopsy revealing death by asphyxiation, they initially suspect erotic asphyxiation is to blame, but the macabre symbol carved deeply into his chest raises alarm bells and suggest something much more disturbing.The more and more that is revealed about peculiar young Harald, both highly intelligent and conscientious, it is his fascination with witchcraft and sorcery through the ages and his passion for body mutilation that provides the initial leads. His planned dissertation had intended to compare the burning, torture and interrogation of witches in Iceland and Germany and it is his interest in the ancient manuscript, ‘The Witches’ Hammer’ that appears to have ignited his fervour. When the director of the university history department, Gunnar Gestvík, is alerted to a priceless missing document, on loan from a collection in Denmark and last viewed by Harald it seems that the mystery is more complicated than they had previously imagined. As Thóra ploughs on through a wealth of documentation she uncovers more questions than answers and the reticence of Mathew to answer specific questions does nothing to further her assurance that she is being given the full story. The drip-feed disclosure of information from Harald’s family is frustrating to say the least, particularly when significant revelations, withheld from Thóra, are belatedly disclosed and it feels like a ruse to cloud the readers thinking and perhaps add a little excitement, which it fails to do.Harald’s friends at the university are a group of similar oddballs and all have a varying level of interest in Harald’s hobbies, and membership of the history and folklore society that he founded, named Malleus Maleficarnum (after the manuscript that so fascinated him). The combined group remain overtly hostile to Matthew and Thóra. His closest friend, Halldór (Dóri) Kristinsson, is a gifted medical student who spent most time indulging in Harald’s persuasions and seems to understand him best, but it is the outspoken Marta Mist who dominates the group. Analysing both his life and recent research interests takes Thóra and Matthew on a dark and disturbing journey through the world of black magic. Occasional snapshots into private conversations amongst the group, which naturally Thóra and Matthew are not privy to, steadily reveal that the group have a lot more to hide than meets the eye…Given my predisposition towards reading translated crime fiction I was rather disappointed by how uninspiring I found Last Rituals. For me, it was a fairly turgid and detail heavy novel, often with a surfeit of superfluous detail thrown at the reader which would have benefitted from some paring back. Whilst this could have been to the advantage of Thóra as she drills down into the finer points that hold the answers, it just feels like an information dump. Personally I had little interest in Harald’s research and found it unremittingly dull and for those whose eyes glaze over at the mention of black magic, perseverance is needed. Last Rituals is essentially a straightforward recounting of a investigation into a macabre murder, but the few points of relevance are bogged down by wading through a plethora of irrelevant and the stultifying intricacies of the history of witchcraft.I found the character of Thóra Gudmunsdóttir a little awkward, perhaps because of her dry sense of humour and pithy remarks which initially missed their mark with the stiff Matthew Reich. Much of the early dark humour is derived from their exchanges which leave a stilted atmosphere. Certainly both warmed up and the more I saw of Thóra the more I became used to her offbeat sense of humour, but it was her supportive handling of a domestic crisis involving her son that redeemed her in my eyes.. only for a glimmer of passion between Matthew and Thóra to emerge.On balance I would struggle to recommend Last Rituals except to those readers who wish to gain an understanding of the backstory surrounding Thóra Gudmunsdóttir. Otherwise, this clearly well researched novel in the very antithesis of a page-turner. Most significantly it is the absolute lack of suspense that runs from start to finish that is the death knell and I cannot shake the feeling that Last Rituals requires an awful lot of effort from its readers for a fairly limited return, principally lacking in impetus and passion. Given the seventeenth-century witchcraft and sorcery angle makes it a “niche” interest, I suspect that the novel will have fairly limited mainstream appeal. Hopefully Thóra’s next job will involve matters more familiar and accessible to the everyday reader!Review written by Rachel Hall (@hallrachel)

I've really enjoyed the first two novels in the Huldar and Freya series as well the as standalone 'Why did you lie?' by the same author. So I've gone back to YS's first novel here, the first in a series featuring Thora, the Icelandic lawyer cum investigator. Here she investigates the rather gruesome death of a German history student at Reykavik University, at the request of his wealthy German family and in the company of Matthew Reich, an ex-policeman working for the family.The strength and much of the entertainment of YS's novels is in the writing which manages to couple a readable story with a sardonic black humour. This is common to all her novels I have read. The plot here is rather gruesome at times, takes in lots of details of Icelandic history and witchcraft, and whilst not her strongest plot is still a highly enjoyable read in the Nordic noir genre. Her later books are translated into English by a different translator, but they still have this signature dark plot and unsavoury characters with the wry humour in observation and dialogue coming through.YS is an author well worth following. Her first novel, and not perhaps her best, but still worth 4-stars.

It's not often you get books based from a lawyer's perspective, and even though Thora the main protagonist is a lawyer, she's also heavily involved in the investigation to solve what was a particularly gruesome murder.There were a lot of characters, but it was easy enough to see where they all fitted into the plot without it becoming confusing, especially with the somewhat difficult to pronounce Icelandic names.For me personally I much prefer faster paced plots, and with 420 odd pages in a book; which let's face it isn't overflowing with action, it took me quite a long time to read. Still the plot concerning witchcraft, stolen letters, and an interest in torture was different to say the least. I hadn't realised that the Inquisition had reached as far as Iceland. You learn something every day.One teeny tiny niggle though. You don't 'fix' pasta, you make or prepare pasta. You only fix something that's broken.I'll try the next book but if it's as slow paced as this one, I may not bother with the rest. Time will tell!

Yrsa Sigurdardottir is one of the few Icelandic writers whose work has been translated into English and this is her first adult book, having previously established a reputation as a writer of books for children. It's a thriller with a rather unusual plot that revolves around the murder of a rich German postgraduate student, Harald Guntlieb, who has been undertaking research into the treatment of witches in late medieval Iceland. The killing is particularly gruesome as his eyes have been gouged out and strange symbols carved on his body. The police quickly arrest one of his student friends on suspicion of the murder and there is plenty of evidence about his guilt. However, for reasons that are not really explained, Harald's family refuses to believe in the suspect's guilt, and hire a local lawyer Thora to assist the family security adviser, former German policeman Matthew Reich, to investigate the case.They quickly find that Harald was obsessed with satanic matters and torture and was the leader of a small group of dysfunctional fellow students who indulged in witchcraft rituals laced with drugs and sex. The accused was one of the group and has no alibi for the time of the murder. Their investigations lead them into the dark medieval world of the persecution of witches, and there are long (probably overlong) sections detailing historical events and documents, that although doubtless well researched, are rather distracting. Eventually they of course solve the mystery of who killed Harald and how and why he died. Finally Thora meets Harald's mother and learns the sad history of the relationship between her and her son.Thora is divorced and bringing up two children by herself, a rather surly 16-year old son and a younger daughter. Her professional life is interwoven with her private life, although it's somewhat peripheral to the main story and does not add much to developing her character until near the end, when we already know a lot about her. In many ways it suggests that she is rather naïve for a mother of two children. Her interactions with Matthew, whose private life is a bit of a mystery (we are not even told if he is married) at least have an element of humour, coming mainly from his dry wit, not always immediately understood by Thora. Overall the two main characters are a bit formulaic. The language grates in a few places, probably due to the translation, but for the most part sounds authentic, as does the occasional briefly described aspects of modern Icelandic life.I have not yet read the author's later books, but this one is not in the class of some other Scandinavian writers, although still a reasonable first thriller.