I don’t normally go in for books with supernatural elements but I made an exception for Shrouded, by Sólveig Pálsdóttir. Pálsdóttir has form for playing about with the boundaries normally associated with police procedurals, and for sticking up for the powerless in society. If she wants to take her characters (and by implication, us) to a seance, then I will go along with that despite my usual preferences for my novels to be medium rare. 

In fact, and importantly, Pálsdóttir is ambivalent about whether the medium has special powers. It’s up to us to pass judgement. Valur Thór is one of several characters who live – not on society’s boundaries, exactly – but outside the norm, at least one standard deviation away, if you’ll allow the maths. There’s a woman who doesn’t understand memory sticks, another with serious brain damage, a widower who’s missing his spouse and now turns up at funerals for virtual strangers. And even among the police team, whom readers familiar with the series will know well by now, there are moments of awkwardness. It turns out that what we thought might be a serious problem stems from the character concerned coming to terms with who they are. Time was, that who she was would have been regarded not as one standard deviation but actual standard deviation. Who we are and what society values and condemns changes over time. And the people we regard as fairly ordinary, may turn out to be anything but. 

Within that mix, let’s welcome back Guðgeir and Guðrun whose ordinariness is juxtaposed well against, for example, the visions experienced by Thór. The cosy domesticity enjoyed by Guðgeir in particular is something we come to rely upon as the novel begins to reflect an unease on the police’s side that such little progress in the case has been achieved. I felt that Guðgeir’s musings on the composition of a quality breakfast, together with the clear description of a police investigation that had just got cold, were reminiscent of the Martin Beck books in which months pass with not much going on. Personally, I found this a welcome contrast to the procedural where a new case magically mirrors a cold case that happens to have presented itself merely a two few moments ago. In Shrouded, everyone has to wait for the cold case and that’s just fine. In the end, there’s a twist and we learn that something we’re all very proud of having worked out wasn’t the whole story. Things just happen, and we, says Pálsdóttir, need to learn to live, or not live, with it. 

When the last character has the last word there’s no hint of real peace, just something involving muddling through, the truth shrouded. It’s bleak and it’s dark but (I later realise) it’s quite liberating. Once again I am glad to have trusted this author – and translator Quentin Bates – to have delivered something unusual, thought-provoking and outside the norm. Perhaps a standard deviation outside.

Thanks to Corylus Books for the review copy and Ewa Sherman for the blog tour invitation.