A crime thriller set on The FAROE ISLANDS

12th November 2021

Devil’s Fjord by David Hewson – crime thriller set on The Faroe Islands.

A remote island. An isolated community. A terrible secret.

The Faroes are a group of islands, owned by Denmark, in the North Atlantic situated between Iceland and the Shetland Islands. They are very remote. Crime is rare, murder is even rarer. Tristan Haraldsen has retired from a desk job in the police force in Tórshavn, the capital of the Faroes (on the largest island, Streymoy) and relocated, with his wife Elspeth, to Vagar – the Westernmost and most isolated of the islands. He has a largely honorary role as District Sheriff – in charge of monitoring the ‘grind’ or whale hunts that the inhabitants obsess about (largely because they bring meat for the Winter months…). He is quite definitely out of place in the small village of Djevulsfjord. One of the village families has two boys – one older but suffering from learning difficulties (and being mercilessly teased by his younger brother). After an incident involving Haraldsen and a whaling knife, the boys run off into the hills surrounding the village. The younger one is thrown off a cliff and dies – the older brother is accused of his murder, and remains out of site in the hills. Haraldsen, aided by the local police presence – a lady called Hanna who believes her brother had been on Vagar before disappearing a while back – investigates. She had sought a posting there with the hope she would find out what happened to him.

They dig deep, and eventually find out both who killed the young boy and what happened to Hanna’s brother. It is not a pretty story. Senior people in the village are involved in what appears to be a pretty murky cover up.

David Hewson is well known for his location based novels – his Nic Costa detective series, for example, really brings Rome to life. He normally spends time in a location to really get to know it before he starts writing. This was however just not possible for Devil’s Fjord and the Faroes. But it absolutely does not show! The sense of place is as strong as it is for any of his other books. You really feel the harshness of life and the terrain, and the impact of the sea and the weather on the day to day lives of the inhabitants.

Devil’s Fjord in highly recommended both for those who like David’s work, and for those who appreciate a good mystery set in a somewhat off the grid location.

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