Book Review of Girls Who Lie by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir (Translated by Victoria Crib.)

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Absorbing Icelandic Murder Mystery

This a competently-written novel made accessible for the English reader by a translator whose first language appears to be English English rather than “American” or “International” English. This is actually done so well that the author appears to have an English voice, which is obviously not the reality. It is nice to be flattered, though, and this is not going to happen with a novel written in any EU-member language anytime soon.

The plot concerns single mothers and how different their place in society can be, dependent on small differences of privilege and, to be honest, luck. (A few decades ago, many Icelandic men earned a dangerous living at sea and single mothers were not unusual. The same would have been true in much of coastal Britain, too, a generation or two earlier. “Old fashioned” prejudices against single mothers may, in fact, be 19^th or 20^th century innovations depending on how far North you are.)

The heroine, Elma, a small town female police detective, has to navigate a lot of assumptions, many of them false, and omissions (because it took several months for her missing person case to become a murder case) to get anywhere near the truth. The reader, too, is led into false assumptions to teach them a lesson. There is tension and excitement as the novel approaches what seems to be a traditional Icelandic happy ending, which allows life to go on without the exact truth becoming generally known or “justice” really being done.

Girls Who Lie by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir is published in the UK by Michael Joseph 2021.