I had heard of this book for some time, and I wanted to read it, but the budget did not allow me to buy it at the time I discovered it. Recently, I was in Sibiu, my best friend, and she surprised me pleasantly by making my gift. Although I had to take advantage of the time spent with her, I could not help but read it, to find out soon that it was hard for me to leave the book.
Yrsa is an Icelandic writer, but I do not think it's necessary to write too much about her here. What's important to know is that, at the moment, this is one of the most widely published Scandinavian novelist.
The book has a white ball from the cover: the photo is very suggestive (referring to the content of the book), and the text under the photo "Mistery Island: A Ghost-Haunted Romanist" makes the reader more curious about the novel.
The book begins with an action in February, 1945 when an orphaned little girl is recently taken by a man and imprisoned in a former coal bunker. She hopes until the last second she will be rescued, but her life ends there, in terrible cold.
The action then jumps in 2006 in June, starring Thora, a lawyer who is not very successful, having a very pink family situation. She is divorced and has two children - Soley and Gyfil -. Soley is her little girl aged only 6, and Gyfil is her 16-year-old boy to be father.
It all starts when Jonas calls Thora to ask for help - he had just bought Elin and Borkur (sister and brother) a property on which two farms were located. Jonas has built a hotel there and claims that the place is haunted, and even has seen the monster. Thora is skeptical, but eventually goes there to investigate and seek logical and natural explanations for Jonas' stature.
Shortly, however, Birna, the hotel's architect, is found dead on the beach, with stilettos in her soles. The police do not discover much, so Thora, helped by Matthew - a German - is starting to look for clues or whatever they think they would use.
Very soon, another employee of the hotel - Eirikur, the aura reader - is found dead in a stable from the Tunga farm. He was trampled until he died by a stallion, had a dead fox attached to his chest, and, like Birna, he had sticks in his soles.
Jonas is arrested, being the main suspect, but Thora is compiling another list of suspects that he constantly changes when he finds a clue.
The property is frightening, with a not quite pleasant history. It seems that several decades ago there were brought newborn babies who could not be raised or unwilling and were left to die. In this sense, sometimes, in the evening, there were heartily crying babies, which they all heard, no matter how skeptical they were at the beginning.
Let's go back to action. Watching various tracks, Thora finds out where the little girl was abandoned in 1945 - Kristin was called - along with many other animal skeletons. From there, the attorney manages to tie together the information he has collected and considerably reduce the list of suspects.
Until the last second, she was sure he'd discovered the killer, but then, due to a minor detail he had not taken properly into account, he discovered the real killer who had recognized both crimes when he was caught.
I would have wanted to tell you in more detail, but I would have destroyed the mystery and would have had no charm to read the book if she already knew what was happening in her. As I said above, I do not think it's even a quarter of everything, maybe I was not able to play the moments that keep you in the mouth or the anxiety or the impatience you expect to know who the killer was after tens of times, you were convinced one hundred percent that it was someone else.
Perhaps it was not the best book I ever read, but it was certainly at the top of the list. I strongly recommend it, because it is not a waste of time and no consumption literature.
