Nordic noir novel’s victims had it coming

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This article was published 04/01/2025 (634 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s a pretty simple explanation for why Thorgeir didn’t show up for work, as police detectives Elma and Hordur pull up at his family’s weekend cabin — he’s lying dead in his bed, butchered by ghastly knife wounds.

Not quite the idyllic tranquility one might expect to find in rural Iceland, not far from the capital of Reykjavik.

Should you expect that more murders will follow? Oh yes, indeed yes.

Boys Who Hurt was published in Iceland in 2022 and has just been translated into English and published here in December, delighting murder mystery fans of Nordic noir — especially those who have a particular fondness for victims getting what they deserved.

Boys Who Hurt is an outstanding whodunit from Eva Björg Ægisdóttir’s Forbidden Iceland series, smoothly translated by Victoria Cribb.

Thorgeir had a horrendous home upbringing, not surprisingly being a feared bully at school and later walking out of court after beating a rape charge. Recently, he’d seemed to have met a younger woman with whom he might have found true love. The trouble is that after Thorgeir’s murder, no one can find her, and no one seems to know a lot about her background.

That cabin, however, was the same place his loutish father had died, having fallen out of a boat in the middle of the lake. The cops do notice that elsewhere in the cabin, a weirdly misplaced rug is covering what appears to be a very old stain of a whole lot of blood belonging to person unknown for which no one can account.

Hmmm.

Falling out of boats is rather a common thread in Boys Who Hurt. A sensitive picked-on young boy inexplicably drowned in the middle of the night decades before at a summer camp where he shared a bunkhouse with — you got it in one — Thorgeir and several other major characters.

Nothing sinister there, police had concluded. Don’t read anything into one boy’s father having been a thuggish police chief who didn’t believe in copious notes or extensive reports and investigations. Autopsy? No need, everything’s obvious.

Elma has just returned from maternity leave when our story gets off to its rip-roaring bloody start. Her kindly (and newly widowed) boss Hordur isn’t much help, suffering in excruciating pain after falling off his bicycle but refusing to go to the hospital.

She follows a sordid trail that points to broken marriages, mysterious “paupers” with piles of hidden money, a hole-in-the-wall rural laundry making a fortune through perhaps washing more than clothes, foster homes acting badly, criminal masterminds masquerading as harmless little old ladies, hard-to-find younger sisters who may be pursuing righteous vengeance and who may be two women, or maybe just one. (Like we’re going to tell you more than that.)

Icelandic names are one of the most difficult and confusing issues to tackle in Boys Who Hurt. Mercifully, our author sticks almost entirely to first names, avoiding surnamely patronymics that would completely throw us.

Just try to keep track of Hafdis, Hafpor, Heidar and Hordur. Try, we dare you.

Boys Who Hurt is a darned good read, with a title that can and should be taken more than one way. As you eagerly turn the pages, try not to think of what you thought you got away with in your younger days, and who might be coming for you.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin was relieved to see that none of the murder victims was an elderly Canadian tourist.