Yrsa Sigurdardottir: Someone To Watch Over Me

[bibliogramma]

A fatal hit-and run seems to lead to a haunting of the house where the dead girl used to babysit.

A late night talk show host is tormented by mysterious phone calls and emails from someone who seems to know him all too well.

A paralysed girl who can only communicate through eye movements has a terrible secret.

And Thora Gudmundsdottir receives a strange request from a serial child molester being held at Iceland's major facility for the criminally insane. He want to hire her to investigate a closed case to see if there are grounds for the verdict to be set aside - but it's not his own case. Jósteinn Karlsson wants her to prove the innocence of a severely mentally handicapped young man who is one of his fellow inmates, who was charged with arson and the murder of five people - four of them residents of a community living project for people with disabilities and the fifth an employee there - who died in the fire.

Thora's investigation will ultimately cross the paths of all these people, and uncover the truth behind all these mysteries - or at least, all the truth that can be found.

In Someone To Watch Over Me, Yrsa Sigurdardottir has shaped another fascinating, atmospheric mystery, with just a touch of the strange and inexplicable - but she also gives us a journey into the world of the physically and developmentally disabled, and those who care for them, their fears and frustrations and vulnerabilities. Looming over everything is the shadow cast by the global recession, affecting almost everyone in one way or another. Sigurdardottir's gift is to set her mysteries in a complex and detailed world where there is always much more to be seen than just the crime and the investigation.