Review: The Reckoning by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

A local school in Iceland is due to hold an unveiling ceremony of its ten-year old time capsule project. Yet among the aged notes and predictions of life in the future, one anonymous student included what appears to be a hit list, leading to the police being called in.

Following a demotion and the trailing the shadow of failure, Officer Huldar is assigned to the case. Initially, he would like to dismiss the note as a childish prank and waste of time, but his team is forced to take the note seriously when people start dying. The case thus evolves from possible to prank to planned killing spree, with no indication of who the victims are or how they’re connected. With no more to go on that a series of initials, Huldar must track down the author and restore order.

Huldar’s search reveals a shady past of molestation, murder and the macabre, necessitating the participation of child psychologist Freyja. Together, the pair must uncover the series of events that led to the note, knowing only that it has roots in lost children and unspeakable acts. In order to avoid a repetition of the past, they need to catch a killer with a murky past.

Yrsa Sigurdardottir has a talent for portraying grisly and macabre events with effortless grace, making her stories addictive regardless of the unsettling content. The world she creates is as vivid as it is demented, making it a guilty pleasure to enter into. Sigurdardottir is, without a doubt, a master of duality and the queen of the grey area. Violent and despicable acts are described beautifully, intimately, and without hesitation. At the same time, the notion of justice is teased and investigated – can a cop with his own violent tendencies and a likely drinking problem truly be the best man to enforce the law? The horrors of her tales seem all the more shocking in that they’re set in Iceland, where crime rates are famed for being low. Within this carefully crafted chaos, there is only one unchanging element: Sigurdardottir does not disappoint. I adored this book and its dark contents.

The Reckoning by Yrsa Sigurdardottir is published by Hodder & Stoughton and is available in South Africa from Jonathan Ball Publishers.