Crime fiction set in Iceland – Deceit – Jónína Leósdóttir

Submitted: 18th October 2022

Icelandic crime fiction

.A novel written by a new and exciting voice in Icelandic crime fiction. Jónína Leósdóttir is very well known in her native country – she’s a novelist, playwright and former journalist. She’s written everything from plays, biographies and articles for magazines.

She wrote Deceit, her first novel of crime fiction during lockdown and it’s one of the few novels I’ve read that actually mentions the pandemic.

BookTrail the locations in Deceit

Boarding Pass Information : Deceit

Destination : Iceland

Author guide: Jónína Leósdóttir

Genre: crime fiction

Food and drink to accompany: Something chilled

#Bookreview

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BookTrail the locations in Deceit

An oddly quirky novel that intrigued me as much as it kept me turning those pages.

In a nutshell, it’s about a divorced couple who are middle-aged. Adam is an expat and along with his ex-wife goes about solving crimes. He has been in Iceland for more than 20 years so knows the country and people well. He might have gone back to the UK but for his daughter.

Adam works with the police as a consultant on certain cases. One of the police usually asks for his help – and it’s usually his ex Soffia. That’s an unsual situation and awkward at times. As the author mentions COVID, then we get to see how there are fewer police around and in the office and often Soffia and Adam are the only ones who seem as if they want to even venture outside.

BookTrail the locations in Deceit

I liked the duo that was Adam and Soffia – their differences, their cultures, their view points and everything that results from a broken marriage. The characters are complex and damaged in many ways. As I read I found that they were an odd couple in that all of the other characters are born and bred Icelanders and they view the couple as strange in many ways. Iceland is a very closed society it would seem from this book. If you are Icelandic, then you are accepted into society and if you’re an ‘outsider’ you’re certainly seen as different. Everyone seems to be related to each other in the country – well it is small – and this comes across in a secondary thread where someone inherits a disease.

This felt very remote and claustrophobic – more so due to the Covid pandemic landscape. Odd and quirky, I would also call it fresh and unique. I can see the threads of the series and it’s definately a series i want to return to.