Loved the simultaneous storylines, but rolled my eyes at the magical wrapped-up-with-a-bow-on-top conclusion.

A modern Mary Celeste…

A luxury yacht arrives in Reykjavik harbour with no one on board. Crew and passengers are all missing with nothing to indicate what may have happened to them. Only the fact that the yacht was being navigated by autopilot has brought it to its destination. The yacht had had only a skeleton crew aboard, and the passengers consisted of one family of four – father, mother, and two young daughters. The parents of the father ask lawyer Thóra Gudmundsdóttir to help them. They are looking after the couple’s baby daughter, and they need the couple to be declared dead so that they can claim on the insurance policy for the money they will need to provide for their only surviving granddaughter. But is the family dead? And if so, how did they die?

The story is divided into two sections which alternate: the investigation in the present day, and a short leap back in time to show the voyage and the lead up to what happened on board. My enjoyment was also divided. The section aboard the yacht starts out wonderfully creepily and for a while it's quite difficult to know if there is going to be an actual supernatural element to the story. Sigurdardóttir is great at creating that kind of mysterious atmosphere just at the crossover between reality and the supernatural, and the isolated yacht in the middle of an empty sea provides a frightening and atmospheric setting. However, after a bit these sections become incredibly repetitive and draggy, with nothing really happening to move the story forward. I reached a point where I was skim reading them to get back to the other half of the story.

The sections in Reykjavik with Thóra are lighter and more entertaining This is the 6th book in the series and Thóra and her family and colleagues are now established into a kind of settled pattern. Thóra is a likeable protagonist, although her method of investigation owes as much to luck and coincidence as it does to any great skill on her part. Her strength is her ability to chat to people of all ages and walks of life in a friendly way that makes them open up to her. Her extremely annoying and incompetent secretary, Bella, plays quite a big role in this one, and I'm glad to say that some of the more ridiculous excesses of her antisocial behaviour are toned down a little. Although a reason is given in the first book for why Thóra and her partner haven't sacked Bella, I didn't find it realistic and don't find Bella nearly as amusing as I am clearly supposed to! However I enjoyed catching up with Thóra’s refreshingly functional family – her boyfriend, Matthew, now her long-term partner, her grown-up son and his partner now with a baby of their own, and her teenage daughter. There is enough about her home life to make her feel real but not so much that it overwhelms the plot.

The story of what led up to the disappearance is very convoluted and really stretches credulity quite far. I felt we were given the solution by the author rather than Thóra really working it out for herself. And it all leads up to an ending that is considerably bleaker than I was expecting – too bleak for me, in fact. But that’s why they call it Nordic Noir!

So a rather mixed response to this one from me, finding half the book considerably more enjoyable than the other half. As so often with contemporary crime, I felt that cutting a hundred pages or so in the middle would have made this book tighter and better. It was first published in 2011, however, which was at the height of the trend for over-long crime novels —a trend which I'm happy to say seems to be passing a bit at last. It appears this is the last instalment in this particular series although Sigurdardóttir has gone on to write many more books, both standalones and a new series. I've only read the first and last volumes in the Thóra series, and haven’t quite decided if I’m enthusiastic enough to go back and read the ones in the middle.

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3.5* suspense, scary.

3 1/3

What an incredible read! This is the first of Yrsa's books that I have read and I can't wait to read more.
Beautifully written, this spooky crime thriller is the very definition of a page-turner. Brilliant plot, interesting characters and that ending! Wow. I am truly blown away.

Haunting

What a wonderful mystery. You go in thinking it’s supernatural and just realize the tragedy of the whole book. It does drag a lot though (why the 4 stars). I think this may be the last book in the series, you can guess what can happen next I think from context clues, but said to not get another Thora mystery.

"The Silence of the Sea" follows Thora's investigation into what happened to her clients son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren. The son was able to bring his family aboard a journey to return a luxury yacht from Lisbon to Iceland. His employers had seized the yacht and he thought it would be great to bring his family along. However, weeks later the yacht crashes into a harbor in Iceland and the family and crew are all missing.

Thora does what she does best, talks to people and does her own investigation. She is puzzled and troubled by the missing family of her clients and assumes they are dead, but she wonders how and why. She has her cranky secretary Bella along due to her ties to someone close to the case. I thought in the end that the book did well enough with bringing more interest to Bella. With regards to Thora, she's reeling because her son has plans to move to Norway with his girlfriend and son to live with his father. She's fighting against it, but realizes she can't do much about it. Since her and Michael are at an impasse about it, I wish we had more scenes with the two of them at least discussing things. Michael felt weirdly absent in this one.

The book really slows down to a crawl though when we follow the family on the boat and we slowly get to what happened to them and the crew. I will not lie, I started to skim in self defense after about the 6th time we left the present to jump back to the past in the boat. I saw a lot of readers had the same issue I did and rated the book lower because of that. Honestly I get it, the flow was way out of wack throughout. The boat scenes pick up towards the end though and then you get some reveals about things.

I thought at first this was playing into the supernatural mystery that Sigurdardottir has been
playing with the last few books. I was wrong, but I liked how the book came together in the end.

The conclusion to the book was really interesting. I like that everything was tidied up. This was similar in my eyes to "And Then There Were None" by Agatha Christie. It was a great little locked room mystery in essence taking on board a yacht.