Many thanks to Orenda Books and Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for the advance copy of "The Last Tenant" for review. I'd also like to call out Victoria Cribb for her usual excellent translation from the Icelandic.
"The Last Tenant" is Book Six in Eva Björg's "Forbidden Iceland" series. As in her previous books, this Eva Björg mystery haunts you long after you finish it. The events of the book span over 50 years—a long view of a world in which truth and lies are indiscernible. Some of the characters are even lying to themselves. This feeling is heightened by the author's skill in creating strange and peculiar characters who could be innocent or capable of more menacing acts. This ambiguity means that multiple people are plausible murder suspects, and there are more than enough crimes to go around.
The books follow Chief Investigating Officer Elma, Sævar, Hörður and the rest of the team. They're members of the police force in the Icelandic town of Akranes, north of Reykjavik. Elma and Sævar also live together with their daughter, Adda. Sometimes they find this arrangement a bit of a challenge, but they find a way to make it work.
In the first chapter, "Autumn", Eva Björg adroitly sets the tone. An anonymous narrator is having some disturbing thoughts about an upcoming visitor he calls the "new girl". He knows a lot of information about someone he's never met. His thoughts are a great example of character ambiguity; is he a bit of a creep, or something much worse?
There are three other season-titled chapters, each narrated by an unnamed character, that help to illuminate part of the story. The rest of the book is told through the alternating viewpoints of Elma, Karitas, and Kristófer. Seeing the story through the eyes of three people further blurs the narrative line between truth and lies.
We begin with Elma, a Reykjavik police officer who has just been called to the scene of a farmhouse where a body has been discovered. When she gets there, she joins colleague Hörður, who is looking at some old bones in the ground. Bára from Forensics tells them all she knows: the skeleton is a young girl, and the body has been there at least two or three years. The strange thing is that the farm has been deserted for half a century.
Alarmingly, Bára makes another discovery close by. It turns out to be the bones of an infant, wrapped in a piece of cloth. Unlike the skeleton of the girl buried nearby, the bones are far older. Elma and her team are now confronting two possible crimes. The girl will be challenging enough to identify. The story behind the remains of an infant who died 50 years ago or more seems impenetrable.
The story then turns to Karitas, a single mother with an unhappy past. She's starting a new job in Akranes and she and son Bessi are moving into a rental apartment. The landlord is Baldvin, who responded to an ad she posted online. The rent is so low that Karitas at first thinks it must be a scam, but she needs a place to live and it's what she can afford. Now that she's about to meet Baldvin for the first time, she's having second thoughts. His appearance does not reassure her:
Baldvin is a strange man, elderly but with a childish way of acting that's very disquieting. He shows Karitas around the apartment but follows her a bit too closely, adding to her unease. He mentions that his daughter, Heiðdís Sunna, shares a similar name with Karitas, whose full name is "Karitas Sól". ("Sunna" and "Sól" both mean "sun".) Although Heiðdís "left ages ago", according to Baldvin, she "comes when I need her." Weirdly, he still has all of her things. He even persuades a reluctant Karitas to try on one of his daughter's coats. Before she can stop Baldvin, he snaps a photo of her and quickly leaves.
One night, Baldvin invites her and Bessi to dinner at his flat. Something Baldvin says while they are eating dessert leads Karitas to think that he might actually be a danger to her and Bessi. Given Baldvin's actions up to this point, I was already concerned for Karitas and her young son.
The third narrator is Kristófer, who lives next door to Baldvin. Kristófer is a grown man who's unemployed and still living at home with his father, Hemmi Hermannsson, and Hemmi's new young wife Rós. He resents them both, especially Hemmi, who refuses to lend him the money for a new startup that Kristófer is convinced will make him rich. Kristófer is a hard person to figure out, outwardly charming but with signs of narcissism and immaturity.
Karitas meets Kristófer, who is sitting on his front porch, on her way home from shopping. He tells Karitas that as a kid, he used to be scared of his neighbor Baldvin. Karitas, who finds Kristófer attractive, laughs it off. He asks her to go on a date to the beach with Bessi and she agrees. Eva Björg really knows how to up the suspense; the chapter ends with "Then everything went wrong."
Keeping us in the dark, Eva Björg returns to the investigation. Elma and team are still trying to identify the two bodies found at the abandoned farm. They track down the farm's last tenants, husband and wife Jón and Diljá. Jón died in 1969 and Diljá went into a nursing home that same year. Their son Búi left the farm at an early age and never returned, for a very good reason. Jón was a cruel husband and a worse father. His family were not the only victims. City girls and boys came to work at the farm every summer, and Jón's abuses left many of them with lifelong scars.
The threads connecting the bodies are slowly pulled apart by Elma and her team. They first identify the more recent body, a young girl who was reported missing six years ago. Her car, shoes, and coat were found on a sandy beach. Because she was shattered by her mother's recent death and had started drinking heavily, it was pronounced a suicide and not investigated. This gives the police a crucial link pointing to Kristófer. When she disappeared, she was Kristófer's girlfriend and lived with him in his father's house. Baldvin, living next door, knew her too, and tells Karitas that she used to come over now and then "when she was lonely". Karitas soon has reasons of her own to wonder if Kristófer could be involved.
There are other stories to connect before the mystery of the bodies is solved. The pain rippling out from a dysfunctional family on an isolated farm. The tiny bones of an infant, a newborn, laid there 50 years ago. A spoiled rich man with an entitled son who only care for themselves. Childhood friends, one of whom betrays the other and sends him to jail. An elderly man who is not wholly tethered to reality. And in the middle of it all, the innocent and vulnerable Karitas and Bessi.
It's always a treat to read about Elma, Sævar, Hörður, and their colleagues. I've enjoyed following them over the course of the Forbidden Iceland series. I especially liked this installment because of the deceptive intertwining of truth and lies, past and future, and good and evil. Eva Björg writes like a great magician; making you expect one thing and showing you something completely different. It's that element of surprise that really makes me a fan.
"The Last Tenant" can be read as a standalone, but I prefer reading the series in publication order:
Eva Björg Ægisdóttir: Born in Akranes in 1988, Eva moved to Trondheim, Norway to study her MSc in Globalisation. After moving back home having completed her MSc, she knew it was time to start working on her novel. Eva worked as a stewardess to make ends meet while she wrote her first novel, The Creak on the Stairs. The book went on to win the CWA Debut Dagger, the Blackbird Award, was shortlisted (twice) for the Capital Crime Readers’ Awards, and became a number one bestseller in Iceland. The critically acclaimed Girls Who Lie (book two in the Forbidden Iceland series) soon followed, with Night Shadows (book three) following suit. You Can’t See Me (book four) is out in 2023. Eva lives with her husband and three children in Reykjavík.
Victoria Cribb (translator): Cribb studied and worked in Iceland for many years. She has translated more than 25 novels from the Icelandic and, in 2017, she received the Orðstír honourary translation award for services to Icelandic literature.
Please buy/order "The Last Tenant" from your local independent bookstore, or go to bookshop.org and order there. They now offer ebooks as well.
For audiobooks, go to libro.fm.
