NorsePlay considers the Last Rituals.

We took a break from our long four-year reading-fest of comparative Norse Mythology & Norse Lore source materials to book club a ScandiNoir novel by Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Þriðja táknið (translated as The Third Symbol), or re-titled for English audiences, Last Rituals.

Given the goetic-looking runestave symbol and mention of witchcraft flaunted on the cover, we're promised spookiness from the get go, though given this is a first novel in an intended series, we spend a lot more than a goodly amount of time establishing our lead character's voice as a financially challenged divorcée mother-of-two's status as a lawyer-cum-detective.

As a grown late-30s-something with what one would presume much criminal defense experience in what's arguably the most feminist country in the world, attorney Thóra Gudmundsdóttir's surprised reactions due to her underexposure to body modifications, BDSM, and other subculturally outré elements in the mystery comes off like an obvious device to get readers' sympathy. One might argue this undershoots the already sophisticated ScandiNoir audience used to the established tattooed likes & grim tropes of Sweden's Stieg Larsson, but The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo came out in August 2005 while Last Rituals came out just a little later in November 2005, and it takes a year or two for works translate into the English marketplace, so the global Nordic Noir audience wasn't really popularly established when LR came out. So there's still this similar use of the transgressively edgy versus societal conventions, but it instead feels like when Madonna's Sex BDSM-lite book coffetable'd back in 1992 -- most shrugged and pretty much said, "Yeah, we already knew about that."

Otherwise there's moments where Sigurdardottir's extended character development works, because you like and root for Thóra, and she's probably more real as the author actually is a mother of two with an engineering day job, so Sigurdardottir's definitely writing what she knows in an effective manner. But in comparing internal aspects, Last Rituals has stronger characters than its pacing or settings.

In keeping pacing, the earlier revelations are less impactful than you'd expect, while the intensity of the solving doesn't really ramp up until the last act, and then only just. The investigation isn't so much the driving force as are the circumstantial events that unfold around the protagonist who happens to just be there to present summation in the end.

With setting, if you've been to Reykjavik there's a frisson of delight when reading street names, or the characters eat at a landmark hotel, which feel like you just went back for minute, but that's because you may already know it. Honestly, we'd bought this book to read before our trip, but we didn't, though we think if we had read it before then it would've lacked an inverse of the above delight as it doesn't provide enough descriptions of settings to make it mentally transportive enough, though the places outside Reykjavik get a bit better day trip treatment than the ones in the city, but not by much.

In terms of craft, Last Rituals reads like a debut novel, but you see the potential here, and as of this as of this writing, the Thóra Gudmundsdóttir series is up to six internationally successful installments, the most recent in 2011. Gudmundsdóttir also published five children's books before this, but those remain untranslated.

Influentially, there's something amoral about the murder victim that reminds us of the antagonist in Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, which came out four years later, and given that its original title is "symbologically" related, we wonder if Brown read Sigurdardottir.

As a fiction reader, we come from a fantasy/contemporary fantasy/horror background, so maybe our expectations were less mystery and more the ritual cowl of black Icelandic magic from the tagline, but at the end we weren't really given the grimoire of hidden knowledge we'd wanted. You could find more of that kind of thrill reading a White Wolf gaming supplement, which has many more pages of dark secrets than what Sigurdardottir delivers here, so maybe we weren't her primary audience for this. And most might come to an Icelandic novel with the anticipation of running into Viking or overt Saga references, but that's not here either.

Last Rituals does successfully play with an admixture of academic environment, lawyering, group cult/persona dynamics, and family relations/secrets. Many of those ingredients do resemble literary heritage elements of Íslendingasögur, or the family sagas of Iceland, which are medieval works probably responsible for the modern novel, so in that there's an incidentally reflexive quality in Last Rituals. For us, this wasn't enough to recommend it, but as an offering from a country where 1 in 10 do publish a novel, spotting those things from a saga background, along with the characters, was enough to get us to finish reading it, though we definitely felt it could've had way more NorsePlay written into it than that.

[Book Club Addenda: While we both enjoyed Last Rituals, and both agreed about its shortcomings, my co-reader by contrast has decided she'll probably continue reading the series just to find out what happens to Thóra. If I hear from her that the series does swerve further into NorsePlay territory, I'll let you know.]

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Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires' Norse Gods and Giants at age seven. Since then he's been fascinated by the truthful potency of Norse Mythology, passionately read & studied, embraced Ásatrú, launched the Map of Midgard project, and spearheaded the neologism/brand NorsePlay. If you have employment/opportunities in investigative mythology,  field research, or product development to offer, do contact him.