Death in the diplomatic service

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This article was published 03/05/2025 (535 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Eliza Reid has been a force in the Icelandic literary community for over a decade. In 2014 she co-founded the Iceland Writers Retreat, just two years before becoming first lady of the country after her husband, Gudni Johannesson, was elected president, a position he held until 2024.

And while the Ottawa-born Reid (whose mother and maternal grandparents have Winnipeg roots) has written extensively for a range of Icelandic publications, it wasn’t until 2020 that she penned a book of her own, Secrets of the Sprakkar, which detailed the achievements and contributions of women in her Nordic country.

Now Reid, 48, has returned with her first work of fiction, Death on the Island, published April 29 by Simon & Schuster in Canada. Reid will be in Winnipeg at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location on Sunday at 2 p.m., where she’ll be joined in conversation by Shelagh Rogers. (She’ll also be at Gimli’s Unitarian Church at 3:30 p.m. today.)

The premise of Death on the Island: At a dinner party, guests (including diplomats, business leaders, a novelist from Gimli and others) mingle before the restaurant serves up its signature cocktail, the Flaming Viking, as a welcome. Within moments, the Canadian deputy ambassador is dead, seemingly poisoned.

But which of the guests gathered at Skel, the high-end restaurant located on Iceland’s Westman Islands, could have done it, and why? That’s what Jane Shearer, the head ambassador’s wife, wants to find out.

Reid started work on Death on the Island right after finishing Secrets of the Sprakkar. “I was in the writing mindset; I had enjoyed that process,” she says by Zoom from her home outside Reykjavik prior to her Canadian visit. “And I thought, you know, if I ever want to write another book, maybe I should start right now — otherwise I’ll tell myself that I’m too busy to actually do anything.”

She’s already at work on a sequel to Death on the Island, and on May 1 it was announced her debut work of fiction had been picked up to be made into a TV series in a joint Iceland-Canada production, for which Reid will serve as executive producer.

Rather than join the long and rich literary tradition of bestselling Nordic noir thrillers, Reid fancied a less grisly and dark murder mystery, inspired more by the likes of Agatha Christie.

“I don’t know that I would define it as necessarily a cosy mystery … I’ve always loved the British-style, closed-room murder-mystery,” she says. “You’re not going to discover five pages before the end that the murderer is someone you’ve never met. I want to give the reader a fighting chance to be able to figure out what happened.”

Setting the novel on one of the Westman Islands allowed weather to trap the cast of characters on the island when the ferry shuts down and flights are grounded — and the suspense ratchets up.

It also gave Reid a chance to highlight the remote, relatively unknown locale.

“It’s an area of the country that visitors know a bit less about, but like many regions of the country, it has this long rich history,” she says, noting a 1973 volcanic eruption that decimated many homes on the island also proved an “interesting metaphorical backdrop.”

Reid’s own experiences and interactions with ambassadors and diplomats served as an inspiration in writing Death on the Island — particularly the misconceptions around what they do.

“It’s a bit of an homage to the diplomatic service. When I was serving as first lady, I saw the work they did first-hand and I think that it’s often unappreciated.

“I think that there’s a sense that it’s very glamorous, people drinking champagne all the time,” she says, adding with a laugh “the book’s not an international thriller where they’re going around the world to bring about world peace, but I’m hoping it’s a little sexier than ‘I lost my passport somewhere.’”

ben.sigurdson@freepress.mb.ca