The day is dark by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

Yrsa Sigurðardóttir is a prolific Icelandic author of both crime novels and children’s fiction, who began writing in 1989. The Day is Dark is one of the earlier books in her crime series featuring Thóra Gudmundsdóttir, a lawyer based in Reykjavik, who works on mundane family law and divorce cases in a small private practice, along with Bella, an incompetent but amusing young secretary. Thóra is a youngish grandmother with a typical range of family and relationship concerns. But she also has a knack of becoming involved in helping to resolve major criminal cases.

Action in The Day is Dark mostly takes place on the remote western coast of Greenland, where Thóra is seconded as a member of a small team created by a German bank, where her partner is a senior executive. The bank is concerned at developments at a proposed Berg Technology rare mineral mine close to a tiny Inuit village. A woman employee disappears without trace and a few months later all contact is lost with the only two remaining workers at a time when all the remainder of the team have returned to Iceland and are refusing to return to the Greenland site.

Members of the work team apparently believe there is a curse on the place, perhaps arising from a mysterious phenomenon a century before, when a small Danish colony there suddenly died out. There might be explanations for that tragic event such as heavy metal poisoning or a pandemic. But the villagers believe that a malign spirit or Tupilak has cursed the region, and have banned their community from all contact with the area where the mining camp is established.

There are three ongoing threads of the narrative through the eyes of Thóra’s team; Iqmag, an ageing traditional Inuit hunter on the fringes of the village; and a former member of the work group with morbid regrets about his role there while in alcohol addiction recovery back in Iceland.

Tensions grow between the members of the investigating group as doubts grow about the fates of the three missing workers and who might have been involved in their apparent deaths. The villagers mostly refuse to cooperate or communicate and seem terrified of the evil spirits at the mine site. There are also unexplained deaths amongst the Inuit community and a high level of alcoholism. As well, no boys have been born for decades, and the community is slowly dying.

As the expert members of the group investigate the physical evidence, Thóra examines the complex relationships among an isolated work group: bullying, alcoholism, irrational hatreds. The newcomers to the camp feel more and more threatened by the environment: both the physical dangers of the land of ice and snow, and those emanating from hostile locals.

In the end, the answers to the various deaths and disappearances are found, but the outcomes for many involved are complex and dispiriting.

This is a well-considered if fairly bleak crime novel, set in hostile but realistic icy locations. The work demonstrates why Yrsa Sigurðardóttir is considered one of Iceland’s leading crime writers.

Reviewed by Peter Maywald
SMSA Member