@internrachel @julia1

I just finished Last Rituals by Yrsa Sigurdardottir (336 pages).

This novel was originally written in Icelandic and it’s set in Iceland. A German student at the university in Reykjavik is gruesomely murdered and the family is convinced the police arrested the wrong person, so they send a family employee (who happens to be a former detective with the German police force) to work with local lawyer Thora Gudmundsdóttir to find out who did it.

I liked this a lot. Iceland was more than where the story happened to be set, it was really a part of the story itself. The murdered man was a grad student in history who was fascinated with the witchburnings in Iceland’s past and it was his investigations into theis past, which intersected with a particular obsession of his, that caused his murder. Thora is a great character. She’s smart and capable, but in a real-person kind of way. Like, she’s trying to deal with being a divorced single mother of two juggling her family life with her work. It’s hard and she doesn’t always get it right. But she always tries! And a lot of the time, she gets it right.

Also, Thora is a freaking awesome name. In fact, all the names in this book are awesome. I love Icelandic naming conventions.