I’m always a bit trepidatious about agreeing to blog tours, which is why I don’t do many. What if I don’t enjoy the book? I only blog about books I like so what if I have to drop out? Thankfully Corylus Books have never done me wrong, consistently offering excellent crime novels in translation.

When they suggested Shrouded by Sólveig Pálsdóttir (2023, transl. Quentin Bates 2023), I had two questions: did it matter that I hadn’t read the others in the series? Was it gory (I can’t do gore)? Reassured on both counts, I’m so glad I took the opportunity to join in because I found much to enjoy in this novel.

My allotted date for the tour was 1 August so this is also my first post for Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth), a wonderful and well-established event running for the whole of August.

Here is the blurb from Corylus Books:

“A retired, reclusive woman is found on a bitter winter morning, clubbed to death in Reykjavik’s old graveyard. Detectives Guðgeir and Elsa Guðrún face one of their toughest cases yet, as they try to piece together the details of Arnhildur’s austere life in her Red House in the oldest part of the city.

Why was this solitary, private woman attending séances, and why was she determined to keep her severe financial difficulties so secret? Could the truth be buried deep in her past and a long history of family enmity, or could there be something more? Now a stranger keeps a watchful eye on the graveyard and Arnhildur’s house.

With the detectives running out of leads, could the Medium, blessed and cursed with uncanny abilities, shed any light on Arnhildur’s lonely death?”

The story opens with Arnhildur preparing to go to a séance. We are privy to her thoughts, her frustrations and her little vanities. In a very short space, Pálsdóttir creates a sense of Arnhildur so that when she is murdered, the injustice is fully realised. Although the reader is witness to the murder, it isn’t remotely gory or gratuitous. It’s a responsible and carefully balanced portrait which insists that the murder of an older woman, someone seemingly entirely ordinary, is taken seriously.

Having not read the rest of the series, when police detectives Guðgeir and Elsa Guðrún arrive to investigate I was expecting some clunky exposition to bring readers up to speed. This never happened, and instead we are presented with an established working relationship, respectful and gently teasing, in which we are expected to draw our own conclusions regarding the personalities of the individuals and the dynamic between them.

“‘It’s never this dark in Akureyri,’ Elsa Guðrún assured him, a tie between her teeth as she pulled her brown hair back into a ponytail.

‘Really?’ Guðgeir grinned. This north country pride that some would describe as conceit had always amused him. ‘All the same, it’s a good way further north than Reykjavík.’

Elsa Guðrún wasn’t going to accept Guðgeir’s straightforward geographical point.”

The relationships with the wider team are well drawn, with a sense of professionals rubbing along together as best they can with some tensions and frustrations – in other words, most people’s working lives. There is humour too, and I particularly enjoyed tightly-wound senior officer Særós’ penchant for Insta-type inspiration:

“As always, the week’s aphorism hung on the wall behind her, a print out with black letters on white in a simple IKEA frame. This week it said, Always be the best possible version of yourself.”

Arnhildur was resistant to change and technology, which means no mobiles with sophisticated GPS, laptops or tablets of hers are available to aid the investigation. This made for a police procedural that felt pleasingly traditional while still rooted in the modern world.

One shortcut that might have been available was the presence of Valthór, a medium. I know some readers whose hearts sink at the presence of a psychic in detective stories, but Pálsdóttir never uses the character as an easy way to resolve any plot, despite one of her detectives being open to the possibility of Valthór’s skills:

“Growing up in the west of Iceland, he had been aware that most older people had some belief in an afterlife, and that there were a few people with the ability to converse with the dead. Many of them also believed in premonitions, dreams and prophecies. The people with whom Guðgeir had grown up had fought for their existence, in close touch with the brutal forces of nature that regularly demanded people’s lives. These people had been more down-to-earth than any Guðgeir knew today, and he was still convinced that there was much about the world that could be neither felt nor seen.”

Valthór is a really affecting character, truly suffering in the aftermath of Arnhildur’s death and he enables a continued emotional resonance within the story as Guðgeir and Elsa Guðrún pragmatically and doggedly work to solve the crime.

They discover aspects of Arnhildur’s past that led to her estrangement from her family, and truly disturbing events touching her life before she died. There are a couple of very sinister characters that are deeply unnerving in their believability.

Shrouded is a quick pacy read that I whizzed through on a train journey to Liverpool. Initially I was smugly congratulating myself that I’d guessed certain elements and I was somewhat surprised that a novel which seemed so accomplished had resolved things rather straightforwardly. However, I was far too quick to pat myself on the back 😀 I’d made all the assumptions and deductions Pálsdóttir had guided the reader towards, and I’d missed others entirely, which meant the very end made for a surprising and really satisfying conclusion.

Shrouded is responsible in its treatment of the victim, it’s never sensationalist. It has plenty to say about how people who don’t easily fit in are treated. It demonstrates the complexities of relationships between flawed people (ie all of us) without having characters behave in ridiculous ways.

I realise I’m making it sound dull when it really isn’t! It makes important points without losing sight of the story. I really enjoyed Shrouded and now I need to read the preceding novels in the series; my TBR is never going down, is it…?

Here are the rest of the stops on the blog tour so do check out how other readers found Shrouded: