It’s a sneaky extract of Cage by Lilja Sigurdardóttir post on the blog today – this is the third and final instalment of the Reykjavík Noir Trilogy Series that has everything a crime fiction read should have, from drug smuggling to murder, that’s a win for all readers right there.
Icelandic crime-writer Lilja Sigurdardóttir was born in the town of Akranes in 1972 and raised in Mexico, Sweden, Spain and Iceland. An award-winning playwright, Lilja has written four crime novels, with Snare, the first in a new series, hitting bestseller lists worldwide. The film rights have been bought by Palomar Pictures in California. Lilja has a background in education and has worked in evaluation and quality control for preschools in recent years. She lives in Reykjavík with her partner.
Follow Lilja on Twitter @lilja1972 and on her website liljawriter.com
Cage Blurb
The prison doors slam shut behind Agla, when her sentence ends, but her lover Sonja is not there to meet her. As a group of foreign businessmen tries to draw Agla into an ingenious fraud that stretches from Iceland around the world, Agla and her former nemesis, María find the stakes being raised at a terrifying speed.Ruthless drug baron Ingimar will stop at nothing to protect his empire, but he has no idea about the powder keg he is sitting on in his own home.
At the same time, a deadly threat to Sonya and her family brings her from London back to Iceland, where she needs to settle scores with longstanding adversaries if she wants to stay alive.
The Reykjavík Noir Trilogy Series include:
All three of these bookish instalments have been translated from Icelandic by Quentin Bates, who has done a brilliant job! You can check out all three here, Cage was released in paperback on the 17th so it’s available to order now! You can order directly from Orenda’s Ebook store here!
So here it is, an extract from Cage chapter 9, if this doesn’t wet your reading tastebuds, i’m not sure what will.
Oh, Agla,’ said Ewa, the prison officer with the Polish roots, when Agla appeared in the reception suite accompanied by Guðrún, who was carrying the bag of medication Agla was supposed to take.Guðrún handed the bag to Ewa to deal with, but Agla was still finding it difficult to speak, so she just nodded to Ewa and looked away. She was consumed by a sudden desire to apologise to Ewa, as if she owed her a debt for the friendliness she had shown her since she had started work at the prison, but she was still in too much of a daze. Ewa took her arm and led Agla – cautiously, as if she were fragile – along to the female corridor.
‘Let me know if you need anything,’ she said in a low voice. ‘What -ever it is. There’s nothing so big or so small that I can’t try and fix it.’
Agla smiled weakly. Although Ewa was always ready to help, she couldn’t give her back her life, take those bad decisions back, neatly tie up the loose ends, or rewind a couple of decades. And she couldn’t assuage the pain of losing Sonja, which still only left her for a few moments at a time.
More than four years had passed since Sonja had vanished from her life, leaving only a short text message that simply stated that she couldn’t do this any longer. Agla had sat numb on the unopened boxes in the huge house she had bought for them and replayed their every conversation over and over in her mind as she searched for an explanation. Now, all these years later, she still had no understanding of why Sonja had left her, and the rejection still seared.
Ewa squeezed her arm gently as she left her at the entrance to the female wing. Agla went straight to her cell. The door stood open, and she was panicked by a thought: would the noose still be hanging from the radiator? But then she saw someone lying in her bed.
‘Hæ,’ the girl said, sitting up. ‘You’re supposed to be on suicide watch, so you’re in the security cell and I’m in here now.’
Agla stared at her and her eyes scanned the cell. It was as if she was in a dream – reality had been shoved to one side and twisted. She recognised the place, but didn’t. There were clothes all over the floor, a suitcase was open on the desk and the girl on the bed was surrounded by scattered sweet wrappers.
‘Did you try and top yourself ?’ she asked, putting a piece of chocolate in her mouth. ‘Sorry, I was in rehab right after I was sent home from Holland to finish my sentence here, and now I’m completely hooked on sugar.’
Agla opened her mouth to ask who she was, but stopped. There was still no sound coming from her larynx, and it was even painful to whisper. It was no business of hers who this skinny, scruffy bitch who had stolen her cell might be. She turned in the doorway and went to the cell at the end, next to the door to the communal area, and there she found her things. One of the warders had laid out her personal stuff
on the shelf in the bathroom and stacked her books on the table, but her clothes were still folded up in a cardboard box.
Agla let herself fall back on the bed and stared up at the all-seeing eye of the security camera that glinted in its glass dome in the middle of the ceiling. There seemed to be no end to this fuck-up. For the coming days and weeks, she would have to put up with being streamed live.
Did you grab a copy of Cage this October? How about sharing your bookish pictures and what you think of it and / or the series as a whole? Whatever you share concerning your Orenda Books this month, please use the hashtag #Orentober so we don’t miss your tweets OR if you’re on Instagram share there – help spread the Orenda Book love this month!
The Reading Closet 