Translated by Victoria Cribb.
Born in Akranes in 1988, Eva Björg Ægisdóttir studied for an MSc in globalisation in Norway before returning to Iceland to write her first novel. Combining writing with work as a stewardess and caring for her children,
Eva finished her debut thriller The Creak on the Stairs, which was published in 2018. It became a bestseller in Iceland, going on to win the Blackbird Award. Published in English by Orenda Books in 2020, it became a digital number-one bestseller in three countries, was shortlisted for the Capital Crime/Amazon Publishing Awards in two categories and won the CWA John Creasey Dagger in 2021. Girls Who Lie, the second book in the Forbidden Iceland series was shortlisted for the Petrona Award and the CWA Crime in Translation Dagger, and Night Shadows followed suit.
With over 200,000 copies sold in English alone, Eva has become one of Iceland’s – and crime-fiction’s – most highly regarded authors. She lives in Reykjavik with her husband and three children.
Published 20th June 2024 by Orenda Books.
From the cover of the book:
Fresh from maternity leave, Detective Elma finds herself confronted with a complex case, when a man is found murdered in a holiday cottage in the depths of the Icelandic countryside – the victim of a frenzied knife attack, with a shocking message scrawled on the wall above him.
At home with their baby daughter, Sævar is finding it hard to let go of work, until the chance discovery in a discarded box provides him with a distraction. Could the diary of a young boy, detailing the events of a long-ago summer have a bearing on Elma's case?
Once again, the team at West Iceland CID have to contend with local secrets in the small town of Akranes, where someone has a vested interest in preventing the truth from coming to light. And Sævar has secrets of his own that threaten to destroy his and Elma's newfound happiness.
Tense, twisty and shocking, Boys Who Hurt is the next, addictive instalment in the award-winning Forbidden Iceland series, as dark events from the past endanger everything…
Fresh from maternity leave, Detective Elma finds herself confronted with a complex case, when a man is found murdered in a holiday cottage in the depths of the Icelandic countryside – the victim of a frenzied knife attack, with a shocking message scrawled on the wall above him.
At home with their baby daughter, Sævar is finding it hard to let go of work, until the chance discovery in a discarded box provides him with a distraction. Could the diary of a young boy, detailing the events of a long-ago summer have a bearing on Elma's case?
Once again, the team at West Iceland CID have to contend with local secrets in the small town of Akranes, where someone has a vested interest in preventing the truth from coming to light. And Sævar has secrets of his own that threaten to destroy his and Elma's newfound happiness.
Tense, twisty and shocking, Boys Who Hurt is the next, addictive instalment in the award-winning Forbidden Iceland series, as dark events from the past endanger everything…
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Having just returned from maternity leave, Detective Elma is thrown back into the deep of end of police work with a complex murder case to solve. In the run up to Christmas, a missing man in his forties is found brutally stabbed at his mother's holiday home in Akranes, with a cryptic message scrawled in the wall above his body. She and her boss Hörður are hard put to discover why the son of an upstanding and deeply religious local woman has been killed. All clues point to this being a revenge attack, but whether his murder is related to his personal or professional lives is hard to determine.
Meanwhile, Elma's partner, Detective Sævar is at home with their baby on paternity leave, juggling fatherhood and unpacking from their recent move into a house looks directly onto the home of the murdered man's mother. While sorting through boxes, he comes across the journal of a youth detailing shocking events at nearby religious summer camp, twenty-five years ago. As he tries to find out more about the boy's family, he begins to realise that things the boy writes about might have bearing on the recent murder case. It is clear that someone has been instrumental in keeping sins of the past quiet, but Sævar fears that in uncovering the truth he might also be risking everything...
In the latest cracking instalment of the brilliant Forbidden Iceland series, Eva Björg Aegisdóttir takes us back to the small town of Akranes, where everybody knows everything about their neighbours... or do they? Beginning with a chilling prologue that hints at dark sins from the past, this beautifully contrived mystery unfurls from multiple points of view, including that of the murdered man himself, moving between timelines until many skeletons come tumbling out of their closets - set against the dramatic landscape of the country she writes about so vividly.
Eva Björg Aegisdóttir spins the threads of this story in a way that displays exactly why she is described as the Icelandic Agatha Christie. Like the Queen of Crime herself, the plotting is tight as a drum, motives are murky, emotions are twisted, and there are several mysteries to be uncovered in a masterclass of misdirection. Things are never quite as they appear to be at first glance, and neither are the characters.
The story follows a heart-pounding beat rife with themes about how family dysfunction and covered-up misdeeds lead to consequences that ripple through time to extract a bloody toll on Akranes. Each little piece of the puzzle comes together through the separate investigative efforts of Elma, Hörður, and Sævar, while they contend with the highs and lows of their personal lives. Diverse testimonies, collected evidence, journals, and hunches about things unsaid drive the investigation, and you are kept on tenterhooks as the investigators follow scattered trails of breadcrumbs, until all the icy blind alleys have been traversed on the way to unexpected truths.
Gradually, the guilty are stripped to their bare bones, exposing the vulnerabilities and tempestuous feelings that hide beneath brittle shells. You come to see how their sins have shaped them into the people they are, and in doing so, our talented author explores so many shades of her title, Boys Who Hurt, that it is impossible to cover them all here. Grief, loss, the impact of events of a community, the burden of secrets, yearning for connection, fatherhood, marriage, bitterness, betrayal, domestic violence, the legacy of abuse... all this, and more, comes under her microscope, building fathomless depth into this mystery in a way that it rarely done so well.
Superbly translated by Victoria Cribb, I consumed this book in one tasty bite, carried along on the elegant twists and turns that make this a first class Icelandic crime thriller. Roll on book six!
Boys Who Hurt is available to buy now in paperback, ebook and audio formats. You can support indie publishing by buying direct from Orenda Books HERE
About the author:
Eva finished her debut thriller The Creak on the Stairs, which was published in 2018. It became a bestseller in Iceland, going on to win the Blackbird Award. Published in English by Orenda Books in 2020, it became a digital number-one bestseller in three countries, was shortlisted for the Capital Crime/Amazon Publishing Awards in two categories and won the CWA John Creasey Dagger in 2021. Girls Who Lie, the second book in the Forbidden Iceland series was shortlisted for the Petrona Award and the CWA Crime in Translation Dagger, and Night Shadows followed suit.
With over 200,000 copies sold in English alone, Eva has become one of Iceland’s – and crime-fiction’s – most highly regarded authors. She lives in Reykjavik with her husband and three children.
Thanks for the blog tour support x
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