A Lethal Legacy by Guðrún Guðlaugsdóttir – blog tour

Translated by Quentin Bates

It’s always a delight to read the new titles from Corylus Books, and, using their own tag line ‘to discover new voices’. Icelander, Guðrún Guðlaugsdóttir is not, however, a new author. She’s a journalist with a prodigious output including plenty of interviews and biographies as well as a series of novels with a journalist protagonist.

A Lethal Legacy is a standalone tale, translated by the ever-reliable Quentin Bates. Set in a remote Icelandic community, three elderly siblings, a brother and two sisters, live on an isolated farm – they’ve lived there for almost their entire lives. Now too old to do the work, they have employed Gunnhildar as a nurse/carer, and Thorbjörn and Rósa to manage the farm. The siblings, however, don’t see eye to eye on the farm’s future. Brynjólfur and Thórdís would turn the almost unmodernised farmhouse into a museum of rural life – the cellar is full of original artefacts and farming equipment. Klara is against this idea. Thorbjörn and Rósa, although unrelated have plans – but their marriage is rocky, and also Brynjólfur didn’t get on with them, after Thorbjörn sold off their cattle.

Then one morning Brynjólfur is found dead in his bed. He’d seemed in relatively good health the night before when Gunnhildur gave him his medication. She calls the doctor, and then calls her mother Alma, later calling her again to ask her to come and help, ‘Mum can you come right away? There are weird things happening here at the farm.’ Alma, who is a freelance journalist, has no pressing jobs, and although he puts up a little resistance, her partner Gunnar, who is project managing a remodelling of their house, lets her go to support her daughter and her granddaughter – for Gunnhildur has her young daughter Una staying with her, who thinks she’s seen Brynjólfur’s ghost.

Alma arrives into a complicated situation to say the least. The sisters, while accepting her presence to help as they prepare for their brother’s memorial, are resistant to any prying, and Alma’s journalist’s instinct has to be kept in check. However, she can sense there’s something wrong with the assumed death as suicide, (yet to be confirmed). Alma thinks he was murdered, the suicide theory doesn’t add up but, as she says to the local priest, ‘People have committed murder than lesser things than a large, valuable farm that comes with fishing rights.’

The obvious suspect is Thorbjörn, although he’s too often drunk to have planned a murder. However, she is sure she’s seen a stranger hanging around locally. Alma feels compelled to push at the investigation, but a softly softly approach is called for with the two sisters who aren’t giving anything away about their family – yet.

When Gunnhildur’s estranged partner turns up to take charge of Una – and lo and behold they make up – and she and Una slope off back to the city, Alma, more than slightly annoyed with her daughter, is abandoned to look after the sisters! Now being less of a guest and more a needed helper, especially as Brynjólfur’s memorial wake nears, she begins to make progress including meeting the stranger who brings another possible dimension to the family history – which is steeped in secrets, age-old crimes long hidden and supressed.

Being set in the remote location and not having the police involved, except peripherally, this novel had a very different feel to most murder mysteries. Alma, having been thrust into a difficult situation nevertheless feels she must get to the bottom of Brynjólfur’s death, beit from blood or money…

She is a woman of contrasts though – on one hand an investigative journalist, on the other deep in the throes of a second-time-around relationship. She and Gunnar had separated and refound each other – and their phone calls are rather cringe-making – calling each other ‘my love’ all the time!

Guðlaugsdóttir’s pair of sisters are also great characters. They are chalk and cheese, views poles apart, but are protective of each other on the dutiful sibling level, even if they have secrets from each other too.

The sense of living in this isolated community in which everyone knows everyone else – or think they do – comes across strongly. Somehow, I couldn’t see the farm becoming a successful tourist attraction as a museum of rural life, Brynjólfur and Thórdís having rather a romanticised view of the past, that the present can’t live up to. Alma may have a moment of triumph when she resolves the murder, but there is a tragedy underneath which makes uneasy reading. Guðrún Guðlaugsdóttir is a super addition to Corylus’ stable of Icelandic authors, with yet another different take on Nordic noir.

Source: Review copy – thank you! Corylus Books, paperback original, 234 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s or Amazon via my affiliate links.