Today I’m joining the blog tour for Boys Who Hurt. My review is written with thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me on the tour and to Orenda Books for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

Fresh from maternity leave, Detective Elma finds herself confronted with a complex case, when a man is found murdered in a holiday cottage in the depths of the Icelandic countryside – the victim of a frenzied knife attack, with a shocking message scrawled on the wall above him.

At home with their baby daughter, Sævar is finding it hard to let go of work, until the chance discovery in a discarded box provides him with a distraction. Could the diary of a young boy, detailing the events of a long-ago summer have a bearing on Elma’s case?

Once again, the team at West Iceland CID have to contend with local secrets in the small town of Akranes, where someone has a vested interest in preventing the truth from coming to light. And Sævar has secrets of his own that threaten to destroy his and Elma’s newfound happiness.

Tense, twisty and shocking, Boys Who Hurt is the next, addictive instalment in the award-winning Forbidden Iceland series, as dark events from the past endanger everything…

Review:

I absolutely love this series and after reading the prequel, You Can’t See Me, last year, it was great to be back in the present day to catch up with Elma. I really like Elma. She is younger than a lot of fictional detectives but she doesn’t let that stop her. She is absolutely determined to get to the bottom of the mystery and she thinks outside the box to help her to do this. Her personal life is also interesting to follow: she is in a relationship with her colleague and she has a baby daughter. She has also had some traumatic experiences in the past and although these are only touched on in Boys Who Hurt, it definitely affects the way she works and her relationships with others.

Eva Bjorg Aegisdottir is a brilliant storyteller. Boys Who Hurt is set in Akranes, which is a small town in Iceland with a quite close knit community. Everyone seems to know each other and even those who move away are easily recognised when they return. This means there are some close friendships, but also some toxic ones and I love how the author creates the unsettling atmosphere that runs throughout the novel. 

There are many different strands to Boys Who Hurt, including some diary entries from 1995, and I was really intrigued to see how everything would come together. There are lots of suspects and as Eva (and I as a reader) found more links between the characters, the novel began to take on a life of its own and became very exciting. I did guess the perpetrator slightly before the reveal, but this did not spoil the ending for me at all.

The ending sets us up really well for the next instalment and I can’t wait to read it!

Boys Who Hurt is available from Amazon.

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