MY SOUL TO TAKE
by Yrsa Sigurdardóttir
Translated from the Icelandic by Bernard Scudder and Anna Yates
Reviewed by Kate Morgan
In the starkly beautiful countryside of Iceland's west coast, a woman's body is found, badly
beaten and with common sewing pins stuck in the bottom of her feet. Not far away, lawyer
Thóra Gudmundsdóttir is consulting with her client, the owner of a New Age
health spa in a renovated old farmhouse, over an unlikely lawsuit he wishes to bring against
the original sellers for failure to disclose that the property is haunted. When the dead woman
turns out to be the spa's architect, Thóra's client quickly becomes a suspect and Thóra
launches herself into the investigation in an effort to clear her client from suspicion.
Thóra is joined unexpectedly by her German lover Matthew, formerly an investigator
with the German CID but now in the private commercial sector, whom she met and came to know
during an earlier case (related in the first book of the series, Last Rituals). Once
again, the two act as a team as they sift through what evidence they can find. Despite
widespread tales of apparitions of crying children in the night fog, they dismiss outright
the idea that the property is haunted but are forced to rethink this position in light of
events that cannot be rationally explained. When a second body is discovered &8212; also with pins
in its feet &8212; Thóra is determined to uncover the explanations for both the murders
and the alleged hauntings.
In Thóra Gudmundsdóttir, the author has created a likable, intelligent young woman
who lives a complicated life. Unlike many of her male literary counterparts, she is no morose,
solitary figure nursing old wounds and working her case out over a strong drink (or three!).
She is just plain too busy for that. Not only is Thóra a full-time lawyer; she's also a
divorced mother of a teenaged boy and a six-year old girl and must deal with all that entails.
She may be rifling through old boxes of potential evidence in a dusty basement or interviewing
the owner of a nearby farmhouse, but she still has to make it to court to defend her client and
find a way to cope with the abrupt flight of her son and daughter from their father's house. As
a further complication, there's her unexpected relationship with Matthew, a foreigner who speaks
little Icelandic.
The novel's mystery is delightfully complex. Because they lack access to much of the information
held by the police, Thóra and Matthew must scrounge for clues where they can. In fact,
this situation is one of the novel's intriguing aspects: Thóra's investigation runs
parallel to what, if we were following a police detective, would be the police procedural.
That Thóra's personal life is as complicated as the mystery she seeks to solve only
enhances the story. My Soul to Take is a smoothly told tale, laced liberally with bits
and pieces of Icelandic culture and history, peppered nicely with suspense, and filled with
all the cerebral bits that readers of excellent police procedurals and crime novels love.
I look forward to more novels from this new entrant into the world of crime fiction.