Yrsa Sigurdardóttir is an award-winning author of five children's novels, and this, her first adult novel, features Thóra Gudmundsdóttir as a struggling thirty-six year old attorney and recent divorcée who is trying to raise two young children on her own. One day at work she is surprised to receive a call from an Amelia Guntlieb in Germany, who turns out to be an unpleasant and imperious woman. She wishes to hire her for a job because Thóra had been recommended to her by one of her former law professors at a German university she had once attended. 

Thóra is even more surprised to find out the nature of the call, for Frau Guntlieb wants to hire her to investigate the recent death of her son, Harald, whose body had been discovered at a local Reykjavik university. Complaining that she is a lawyer and not a detective and feeling ill at ease about this woman, Thóra's initial concerns are almost swept under the rug by the offer of an overly generous fee which will allay all of her current financial problems, conveniently so right before Christmas and at a time when she is driving a clunker because her own car is still being repaired at the garage. 

Frau Guntlieb has already sent Matthew Reich, their family representative, to Iceland, but he doesn't speak Icelandic and he will need Thóra's help in negotiating the legal and geographic landscape. Fortunately, English is the preferred second language by nearly everyone, so there will only be minimal problems with communication.  

The subtitle to this novel pretty much says it all when it explains that this is "An Icelandic Novel of Secret Symbols, Medieval Witchcraft, and Modern Murder."  And so it is for some of the students at a Reykjavik university, who have fallen in love with the ancient practices of witchcraft for which many were tortured or burned at the stake back during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. 

It seems that the past can't stay in the past, and one of the students ends up dead. Even in death, Harald Guntlieb was not allowed to rest in peace, for he was horribly mutilated after death in what appears to be some bizarre ritual. His eyes had been cut out and a strange symbol was carved into his chest. The local police wasted no time in arresting Hugi Thórisson, Harald's drug dealer, and charging him with the murder. It seems that Harald's other friends and fellow members of his society were with him in public places and thus have iron clad alibis.

For some unexplained reason, Frau Guntlieb is convinced that the police have the wrong man in custody, so she sent Matthew over to investigate along with requesting Thóra's help. Needless to say, the past didn't kill Harald, so whoever in the present besides Hugi killed him for as of yet unknown reasons will be for Thóra and Matthew to discover. Their search will take them down some pretty grisly paths into Iceland's ancient history of torture and execution of the witches who were surprisingly all male as opposed to the feminine variety elsewhere at the time. The hunt will also involve Harald's obsessive search for an ancient and probably invaluable lost manuscript titled, "Malleus Malleficarum." 

Thóra and Matthew will have to deal with a small group of very disturbed young adults who are deep into tattoos, abhorrent sexual practices, body piercings, mutilation, blood sacrifices, drugs, and many other extremely distasteful pursuits including a missing fortune from Harald's bank account. On top of everything else, Thóra will also have to deal with the secretary from hell at her new firm and a bombshell development on the home front. Thank heavens for the little normalcy here. 

Not very pleasant subjects to deal with or read about, and I for one just do not enjoy reading about them. This novel does have its strengths in likable lead characters, a reasonably well plotted story, and, all in all, a very nicely written novel. Additional kudos to Bernard Scudder for an excellent translation. However, I like my murders to be the old fashioned kind, and none too graphic, thank you very much. Descriptive parts of this novel left me feeling very queasy and unclean after reading them, but thankfully they occurred mostly in the beginning. Then it was on to a more normal detective story. 

Then there is the language problem. Anyone who has been to Iceland or speaks the language will have an easier time of it wading through the place names mentioned in this novel. Worse still is the tortuous way that the Icelandic natives derive their surnames, as witness the names of both the author and her main character, Thóra Gudmundsdóttir. (I defy anyone to fit that on a driver's license...  Thóra is theoretically the "dóttir," i.e., the daughter, of a mother with the name of Gudmunds, or so as I understand the situation.) 

The author, Yrsa Sigurdardóttir, is a leading Icelandic civil engineer who has directed one of the largest European hydro construction projects. She is also one of the directors of Verkís, a large Icelandic engineering firm. She lives with her family in Reykjavik. Translated from Icelandic by Bernard Scudder. 2007, Harper Collins, 320 pages.