We’re featuring two Eva Björg Ægisdóttir thrillers today and it’s a treat to be back immersed in the Forbidden Iceland series. First up is a prequel: You Can’t See Me is set immediately before Elma’s transfer from Reykjavík. Forget about the whole prequel thing – two of our usual detectives are featured but this need not distract us. Like the locked room mystery that it almost is, this novel stands separately from the others in the series. A feature of Forbidden Iceland is that it need not be set in Iceland at all: its themes are universal. Here we have a setting familiar to any crime fiction devotee: a family reunion that uncovers long-held secrets and from which fewer attendees members leave alive than arrived.

The Snæbergs are the family in question. They are a rotten lot. They are one of Iceland’s most glamorous families and their every move provides gossip and glitz. They are wealthy and successful and they seem united enough to hire a hi-tech hotel and celebrate the weekend away. But they are oblivious to themselves and to each other by the time they arrive. By the time they have drunk the bar dry they won’t even be sure who is alive and who is dead. (In fairness, Ægisdóttir keeps that information from the reader for a large part of the novel.)

A theme of Ægisdóttir’s work is injustice that is metered out between generations, and You Can’t See Me is no different, with daughters dealing with maternal neglect, and one case of abuse that has almost certainly been forgotten by the perpetrator but has devastated the life of the victim. Lea, a troubled teenager, is clearly being stalked by a dirty old man. But there’s also jealousy between cousins, as fissures from early adulthood have never been confronted or healed.

We begin to wonder how this family has consolidated its success. The nicer people at the hotel are the outsiders: the people who have married in and who have managed to keep to their own doctrines, helped by disdain and indifference from the core Snæberg clan. And yet every now and again one of them will peer through the fog of booze ’n’ pills to provide some insight. Thus Petra, with whom we share some sympathy, early on, before it’s lost and perhaps regained, notes that daughter Lea’s teen troubles stem from her self-esteem being based on the opinions of others: ‘the difficulty of finding a balance between fitting in and standing out. Between being ordinary and at the same time special.’ Petra remembers her teenage years most acutely but perhaps she never really left them. For this bunch, as the quote goes, high school is never over. Their wealth cocoons them with positive and catastrophic effects. 

In the Snæbergs, Ægisdóttir gives us one of crime fiction’s great dysfunctional families, with addicts, an overbearing patriarch, a vibe that veers between self-doubt and equally crushing self-satisfaction, an abuser, an outsider and a murderer. Somehow, Ægisdóttir and translator Victoria Cribb find the words to make us care about some of them, some of the time. And as usual with this author we have a novel that throws our attention where she wants it. Some of this is a bit underhand, such as where we don’t know who’s missing and why for longer than is really fair. And we have completely the wrong idea about who the ‘me’ is that we can’t see (actually we were right the first time for there are many people here who can’t really be said to be seen). But once they come together we get a compelling and unputdownable denouement that’s both shocking and satisfying.