Kairen Cullen is an experienced doctor of Educational Psychology who now writes full-time. She has a blog http//:psychologistthinkingaloud, which is inspired by her work as a professional psychologist, work with the media and her personal experience. She has had many articles and two books published, which are aimed at a general audience on child psychology, children’s development and parenting. She has also started to write fiction, which draws upon psychology and is focused on crime, relationships and contemporary life.
Lilja is an Icelandic crime-writer and playwright. She has written six thrillers that mostly take place in Reykjavík. Cage was published in Iceland by Forlagid Publishing in 2017. Her novels have been published in Norwegian, Danish, Czech, Macedonian, Polish, French and English and film rights to the Reykjavík Noir Trilogy, which include Snare, Trap and Cage have been sold to Palomar Pictures.
Cage is written via multiple perspectives of the different characters that populate this novel’s 106 short chapters. It took me some time to hold on to the many different threads and to make sense of the characters, largely, I think, because of the complex plot and the fact that the names of characters and places are in Icelandic. Probably, in addition, the fact that I had not read the first two novels in the trilogy made this third book in the series more challenging.
Lilja’s prose style is clean and conveys a sense of realism that engaged and drew me in so that I made sense of the story. The story begins in a women’s prison where Agla is about to be released after serving a sentence for financial fraud and recovering from the breakdown of her relationship with Sonja, another key character. The prison system in Iceland must be very different to that of the UK in that Agla enjoys certain privileges such as access to the Internet and communications with the outside world, particularly with her former nemesis Maria, a private investigator and journalist.
Maria, in some measure, working to Agla’s directions but because of her own quest for truth, is investigating an international fraud centred in Iceland. The mastermind behind this fraud is Ingimar, another complex and conflicted character, who will stop at nothing to safeguard his interests. The story inhabits the dark worlds of drugs, smuggling, big business and political corruption (and is laced with violence and intrigue). It is a page-turner and the reader is unlikely to anticipate its ending in when the various characters and their motivations converge and the whole story makes sense at last.
On the plus-side the characterisation, structure and plot are masterful and if the reader persists with the complexity of the story (and the many angles through which it is recounted), they will be entertained and intrigued but may also learn a fair bit about the Icelandic culture and international fraud.
Editor’s note: translated by Quentin Bates
