Romcom set in the NORWEGIAN FJORDS
Crime fiction set in rural ICELAND, near Selfoss
5th November 2025
A Lethal Legacy by Guðrún Guðlaugsdóttir, crime fiction set in rural ICELAND, near Selfoss
TR: Quenin Bates
Corylus Books, and their translator Quentin Bates, have a well-earned reputation for bringing Icelandic books to the attention of English-speaking readers and I am a huge fan. That said, this book falls a little short of the mark for me. A Lethal Legacy by Guðrún Guðlaugsdóttir is a crime fiction novel with great promise but it felt a little muddled and I didn’t feel my usual great enthusiasm either for the characters or the story.
The novel is set in a rural area of southern Iceland; in fact the location is left rather vague until a wonderfully poetic description right at the end of the book. There are also interesting details about the way farming families might have lived a century or more ago in remote communities.
The main character is called Alma and she is a journalist, with a well-developed sense of curiosity, as befits her profession. She is called upon to help her daughter, Gunnhildur, who is a single parent and also a nurse. She has been nursing three elderly siblings on a remote farmstead, when the brother, Brynjólfur Eiriksson, dies in circumstances that seem suspicious to Gunnhildur. Before long, Gunnhildur swans off with her former lover, leaving Alma to cope with the responsibility of looking after the two surviving sisters.
The Eirikssons had previously brought in a couple, Rósa and Thorbjörn, to manage their farm. Things had gone wrong when the couple slaughtered the farm animals and sold off the fishing quota. (Should that have been milk quota? It’s unclear, as the river isn’t mentioned until the end.) This has, quite naturally, resulted in poor relations between the siblings and the couple. In addition, the siblings themselves are divided about what should happen to their property when they die. The deceased brother and one of the sisters thought it should become a museum, but the other sister angrily disagreed.
Alma employs all her resourcefulness to try to work out whether someone did indeed murder the old man. And this is where the plot starts to get problematic. I found Alma’s curiosity to be beyond the bounds of what was acceptable – snooping around the sisters’ home uninvited. On occasion, the author leads up to a tense moment, then the characters break away to have a trivial and unrelated chat. It’s an awful pity because there are moments of genuine tension and the plot is not without merits.
While reading, I had the impression that the novel wasn’t just a stand-alone, due to the many references to Alma’s relationship history, her twin daughters’ stories and the well-established relationships with other characters. So I checked and there are previous books in the series, although this is the first to be published in English. It doesn’t spoil the story but maybe some apparently irrelevant issues make more sense if you’ve read what went before.
The book does also require the reader to understand Alma’s point of view that it is perfectly acceptable to investigate a murder and other unpleasant crimes without reference to the police force at all. Her actions hinge on the decision by the coroner that the brother took his own life. If you can run with this idea, and overlook a few other unlikely issues, this is still a pretty good read.
Sue for the TripFiction Team
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