Blog tour: The Last Tenant by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir, translated by Victoria Cribb
This post is part of a blog tour organised by Random Things Blog Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.
‘When the skeletons of a young woman and a baby are uncovered on a long-abandoned farm in Hvalfjörður, it is clear they were buried years apart. West Iceland CID begins to investigate the disturbing discovery, aware that someone has gone to great lengths to keep the past hidden.
‘In Akranes, Karitas, a young single mother seeking a new start, settles in with her four-year-old son and rents a basement flat from an eccentric landlord. A cautious sense of happiness returns when she meets the boy next door.
‘But when news breaks that a local girl has been murdered, Karitas must decide who she can trust, knowing that one wrong choice could place her and her child in danger. Detective Elma is drawn into the case, forced to navigate long-hidden family secrets to understand a killer’s motive, while struggling to hold together her increasingly troubled relationship with Sævar.’
In Eva Björg Ægisdóttir’s The Last Tenant – the sixth outing for Detective Elma – the discovery of two bodies, buried decades apart in a derelict barn, brings a twisted web of secrets and lies into the open.
The more recent victim is Sólrún Sveinsdóttir, a troubled medical student who went missing six years previously, and had been presumed dead by suicide after her coat and shoes were found on a beach. In the same grave are the badly-decomposed remains of a newborn, estimated to have been there for around 50 years.
The implication is clear: whoever disposed of Sólrún’s body knew the baby had lain there undiscovered for a long time, making it the ideal place to hide another corpse – at least, until a dog started digging there and its owner raised the alarm.
Meanwhile, young mother Karitas and her four-year-old son Benedikt (Bessi) are settling into a basement flat in Akranes. Their elderly landlord Baldvin is a bit strange, but good with Bessi and seemingly harmless, and Karitas soon finds a love interest in Kristófer, who lives next door with his well-off father Hermann and youthful stepmother Rós.
It transpires, though, that Baldvin, Kristófer and, by extension, Hermann knew Sólrún: are any of them linked to her death? And if so, how? It’s down to Elma to find out, while continuing to manage the demands of motherhood and worrying the spark has gone out of her relationship with Sævar.
Whenever I’m invited to the blog tour for a new Eva Björg Ægisdóttir title, I request a spot without hesitation! As with her previous books, I found The Last Tenant so difficult to put down, I devoured it in just a couple of sittings.
Having gone all Gothic in last year’s spin-off Home Before Dark, Ægisdóttir has dialled up the eerieness in this latest addition to her Forbidden Iceland series, and I’m very much here for it.
While Akranes is small enough that everyone seems to know each other, if you venture far enough from the town centre, you’ll find quite a few isolated and/or abandoned properties like the one where Sólrún and the baby lay undisturbed for years. In her endeavours to uncover the infant’s identity, Elma riffles through books in the main farmhouse that have been untouched for decades, and asks older residents for their recollections of the last occupants – a cold, unneighbourly couple who departed in the late 1960s – adding to the haunting atmosphere.
Baldvin’s house feels similarly frozen in time, even though he still lives there. Following his teenage daughter’s death in an accident 20+ years previously, his wife left him, and he’s been living alone with many of their possessions ever since. His daughter’s room in particular has stayed exactly how she left it.
Baldvin is a major source of suspense throughout the story, as Karitas – and, by extension, the reader – isn’t quite sure what to make of him. Is he simply a lonely, socially-awkward older man who’s so excited to have company close at hand again, he gets more involved with his new tenants’ lives than you’d expect of a landlord? Or are his motivations more sinister? It doesn’t help that, on more than one occasion, Karitas makes unsettling discoveries around her flat that might or might not have innocent explanations.
Kristófer and Hermann also give off dodgy vibes that put you on your guard whenever one or both of them appear in a scene. At first, Kristófer seems like a promising prospect for Karitas and Bessi, but over time, it becomes evident that he’s self-absorbed, petulant, and immature – yet I couldn’t quite bring myself to discount his stories about the lesser-seen nasty side of Hermann, who publicly presents himself as a genial, upstanding member of the community.
There are so many twists towards the end of this book, my head was practically spinning! Kudos to the author for so much clever misdirection, and to the translator for bringing it across the language gap so expertly.
As ever, it was great to be reunited with Elma and co. Book five (Boys Who Hurt) ended on something of a cliffhanger, because Elma was told something huge about her partner Sævar, and I’ve spent the two years since then wondering what the impact was going to be. I was actually quite surprised they were even still together at the beginning of this book, and then I spent quite a lot of it internally yelling ‘TALK TO EACH OTHER’ at them! You’ll have see for yourself whether they confront their issues in time to save their relationship. Elma’s mother and sister, meanwhile, remain brilliantly ‘endearing, witty, and maddening’ (as I put it last time).
The Last Tenant is a haunting and suspenseful novel that keeps you guessing.
