Review: THE DAY IS DARK, Yrsa Sigurdadottir

• 
  This edition published by Hodder & Stoughton
  
• First published 2011
• English translation by Philip Roughton 2011 
• ISBN 978-1-444-70009-1
• 421 pages 

Synopsis (publisher)

In The Day is Dark, when all contact is lost with two Icelanders working in a harsh and sparsely populated area on the coast of Greenland, Thóra is hired to uncover the fates of the missing people. When she arrives in Greenland, she discovers that these aren't the first two to go missing. The local townspeople believe that the area is cursed, and no one wants to get involved in the case. Soon, Thora finds herself stranded in the middle of a wilderness, and the case is as frightening and hostile as the landscape itself.

Chilling, unsettling, and compulsively readable, The Day is Dark is a must read for readers who are looking for the next big thing in crime fiction coming in from the cold. 

My Take

I found this a challenging book to get into. Thora and her team are not clear what the Icelanders missing in Greenland have been working on, something to do with a mine. In any case all the other workers who had been there have have come back to Iceland and are refusing to return.  Thora has been employed by a bank who are covering insurance for the project.  She has been told that the local Greenland residents have been very hostile to the mining team and she discovers that there is at least one more of the mining team missing.

The book is slow to reveal what the project was about, and in the first part Thora's team is looking for the missing workers, initially without much success. 

I found there was a lot of local Greenland customs and superstitions to absorb, a lot of characters to get to know, and even by the end it needed a long denouement for me to understand what had happened, and what the book was about.

A challenging read.  

My rating: 4.5

I've also read

• 4.8, SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME
• 5.0, THE SILENCE OF THE SEA 
• 4.8, WHY DID YOU LIE? 
• 4.9, THE PREY 

SPOILER:  You might want to check this link to confirm the deadly disease that the missing drillers contracted, as well as the dead Greenland woman. It is the disease that the original Greenland villages died from (and why the land where the mine was situated was regarded as a prohibited area). It is an interesting comment on the persistence of deadly diseases.