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A review by fictionfan
The Silence of the Sea by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir
4.0
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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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.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com