#BlogTour ‘Girls Who Lie’ by Eva Borg Aegisdottir

About the book…

When a depressed, alcoholic single mother disappears, everything suggests suicide, but when her body is found, Icelandic Detective Elma and her team are thrust into a perplexing, chilling investigation.

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When single mother Marianna disappears from her home, leaving an apologetic note on the kitchen table, everyone assumes that she’s taken her own life … until her body is found on the Grabrok lava fields seven months later, clearly the victim of murder. Her neglected fifteen-year-old daughter Hekla has been placed in foster care, but is her perfect new life hiding something sinister?

Fifteen years earlier, a desperate new mother lies in a maternity ward, unable to look at her own child, the start of an odd and broken relationship that leads to a shocking tragedy.

Police officer Elma and her colleagues take on the case, which becomes increasingly complex, as the number of suspects grows and new light is shed on Marianna’s past – and the childhood of a girl who never was like the others…

Breathtakingly chilling and tantalisingly twisty, Girls Who Lie is at once a startling, tense psychological thriller and a sophisticated police procedural, marking Eva Bjo¨rg Ægisdottir as one of the most exciting new names in crime fiction.

Translated by Victoria Cribb, ‘Girls Who Lie’ is published by Orenda Books on July 1st, my thanks to them and blog tour organiser, Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for the invite and gifted e-arc.

The remote landscape of the Icelandic setting where this novel is based, provides a superb allegory for the life of Marianna, the woman whose death forms the central mystery in ‘Girls Who Lie’.

Having been missing for 7 months, it had been assumed that she had committed suicide-a lone note to her daughter, Helga, apologising, is all that supports this notion. The location of her body, and subsequent post mortem, however, belies this hypothesis.

No one could have, or would have, thought of ending their life in such an odd place, a cave on the other side of a lava field, and evidence showing she had been violently beaten to death, indicates intent, emotion and a brutally acted crime.

Between Elma’s investigation into Marianna, and Helga’s fractured past, are chapters which narrate the early days of a woman, who has given birth to a daughter. The relationship she has with her unnamed child, known only by the letter ‘H’, must fit in somewhere, in the remit of the investiagtion, but where?

As the reader tries to piece the clues together-could ‘H’ be Helga? No, there is little evidence to support this….-you feel you are literally in Elma’s pocket as she tries to untangle a very knotted skein of a life.

This is Elma’s second outing in the Forbidden Iceland series, and can be read as a standalone novel, but the carefully inserted allusions to the first novel makes me desperate to read my copy. You turn the pages at such a speed here, that you half expect to see sparks on your fingertips, you become so engrossed with this place, this land, which is so far away from where you call home, and yet, through the masterful translation, makes you feel like you could walk the streets of Akranes and Borganes.

The sense of everyone knowing the business of all the other inhabitants, makes it such an attractive prospect for Elma who has moved away from capital Rejkyavik, looking for some solace closer to home. The difficulties are, however, that everyone knows the business of the other inhabitants.

There are little to no secrets, and when a death occurs, the ripple effects are keenly felt. It also means that secrets are very hard to keep, and Elma digs and digs until she gets to the truth. She is a very engaging protagonist, she lifts this police procedural novel out of the mainstream, and to the level of the ‘must read’.

Her own, conflicted back story and relationship with her sister is illustrated from the start, and, as she is playing with her nephew and about to relate a tale of a game they used to play, there is a sense of the calm before the storm and, sure enough, a phone call pulls her back to work.

It feels almost like her investigative work provides a sense of satisfaction and closure that her private life does not have, torturing herself about the death of her partner, David, and finding it next to impossible to move on. This only makes her more human, the shades of light and dark within this novel are painted with masterstrokes as readers find themselves caring, very deeply, about what happened to these women. Listening to, and asking, the correct questions of the women in this book is a central theme on the invisibility, disposability and vulnerability of those who should have been protected better than they have been.

And, because they have been abandoned, looked down upon and neglected, so this affects the next generation, reinforces the stereotype and thus, the cycle continues. Well, until Elma and her colleagues turn up to take an axe to these perceptions.

A wonderfully dark-in contrast with the setting-novel which looks at the way a lie,or an assumption of a lie,can spiral out of control, I would recommend this writer, unreservedly, to anyone who enjoys a book which is literally, off the beaten track.

Suspense, intrigue and engaging characters that you want to know better, are all the hallmarks of an author who is going to continue doing great things!

About the author…

Eva Björg was born and raised in Akranes, the small town featured in her books.

‘The Creak On The Stairs’ was her debut 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.

Twitter @evaaegisdottir RandomTTours @OrendaBooks