Eva Björg Ægisdóttir – Girls Who Lie

‘Girls Who Lie’ by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir and it is the second instalment in the ‘Forbidden Iceland series featuring detective Elma, a young police officer who lives in Akranes, a town on the west coast of Iceland. I was introduced to this authors work with her first book in this series. I thought that was a really good book and all I can say is once I picked this one up I didn’t want to stop reading it. Darker and more disturbing than her previous book, ‘Girls Who Lie’ is a book that isn’t for the faint-hearted among us.

When single mother Maríanna disappears from her home, leaving an apologetic note on the kitchen table, everyone assumes that she’s taken her own life … until her body is found on the Grábrók lava fields seven months later, clearly the victim of murder. Her neglected fifteen-year-old daughter Hekla has been placed in foster care, but is her perfect new life hiding something sinister?

Fifteen years earlier, a desperate new mother lies in a maternity ward, unable to look at her own child, the start of an odd and broken relationship that leads to a shocking tragedy.

Police officer Elma and her colleagues take on the case, which becomes increasingly complex, as the number of suspects grows and new light is shed on Maríanna’s past – and the childhood of a girl who never was like the others…

A story that is, as I said dark, disturbing, chilling and so tense. Again the descriptive writing that the author is so excellently skilled in creates an Iceland that is almost a character in itself. I could actually envision the scenes I was reading. I enjoyed learning more about Elma in this book. We learn more about her own family life and her sister – the rivalry they had is part of her past. It shows us how skilled as a detective she has become as she has a gut instinct when it comes to the nature of the suspects she deals with.

The book moves from past to present slowly feeding the reader to grasp an understanding of the events and why as we are privy to a character’s background. This is woven into the main investigation and creates a fuller overall picture while bringing a sense of intrigue and so much mystery until the very end.

The characters are growing with the series and we have many different characters that are thrown into the suspect pool. This gives us plenty of variety, along with the detectives that kept me truly invested in the story.

A story that explores relationships and all the baggage that travels with them on the journey. A worthy follow up to the first and one that can be read alone but, believe me, you will be scrambling to read the first as soon as you finish this one.

Thank you to Anne Cater and Orenda Books for my copy of the book.