(Netið, 2016)
In Snare, readers first became acquainted with Sonja, a single mom who becomes a reluctant yet extremely capable drug mule in order to secure the funds to fight for custody of her son. In this second novel in Lilja Sigurðardóttir’s Reykjavík Noir Trilogy, Sonja is on the run with her son Tomas, but it’s not long until the criminal elements pulling her strings have tracked her down.
Agla, Sonja’s lover, rejoices at her return to Iceland, unaware of the dangers that Sonja and Tomas face. Perhaps no wonder as Agla herself is facing a prison sentence for market manipulation prior to the fall of the Icelandic krona. Still, Agla has a few tricks up her sleeve and there’s a lot that the government inspectors don’t know about her doings before the financial crash. Hoping to secure a future for Sonja and herself, Agla sets a dastardly plan into action, working against her former accomplishes. However, Sonja’s life of crime has taken her too far. In an effort to weaken the position of the Icelandic drug lords who have hold of her, she finds herself climbing the ladder of the international crime syndicate orchestrating the smuggling from afar.
The strength of Lilja’s crime fiction is in her somewhat amoral protagonists who manage to gain readers’ sympathies despite their unscrupulous conduct and the poor decisions that only escalate their descent into a world of vice and corruption.