The Absolution

Absolutely

3.5 stars

Author is reputed to be "the Queen of Icelandic crime fiction." She also writes children's books. (One wonders whether they have a Brothers Grimm quality about them.) Civil engineer by training, who has been writing since 1998, but she's never given up her day job, presumably because Iceland's population is only 360,000. She has found time to be a mother of two as well. Icelandic superwoman if you ask me.

This is the third in a series involving a child psychologist named Freyja and a police detective named Huldar. In the interests of space, I'll leave out the patronymics. A teenage girl is bashed to death while closing up at the cinema where she has a part time job. The killer, clad in Darth Vader mask and anorak, sends a series of increasing gruesome images of the crime in progress to her friends on Snap, then makes off with the body, which shows up again in a car park several days later. Underneath is a piece of paper with the number 2 on it. Soon after, a teen boy disappears from his home leaving behind mucho bloodstains, and a piece of paper with the number 3. There follows police procedural populated by characters with funny names. Our gal susses out that bullying, both cyber and IRL, is involved, the coppers run around in circles, and where the f*** is number 1?

I'm old enough to remember when nordic noir first emerged as a thing in the anglophone world. Now it's everywhere. This is a better than average story line, but I felt like I was being lectured to about bullying rather more than was necessary, and what I thought was the denouement was followed by several more "spurts" to tidy up pieces of the story line. Like a man with a prostate problem (not me, of course) standing at the urinal in the middle of the night. Now that's what I call a simile.