Review by Booklist Review
Icelandic author Jonasson, known for the Dark Iceland and Hulda series, offers an intense stand-alone, taking to new heights his unrivaled skill for using winter as an unpredictable plot-twister. Daniel has returned to Iceland for a weekend trip with college friends Armann, Helena, and Gunnlaugur. Armann, the founder of a successful tourism company, has persuaded the group to forgo pub crawls in Reykjavik for a hunting trip in the remote west fjords. When they're overtaken by an unexpected winter tempest, survival depends on finding refuge in the area's emergency shelter. When they enter the locked shelter, however, they're met with a stranger silently staring from the corner as he points his gun at them. Their efforts to engage the stranger fail, and the friends' dormant strife begins to feed on the strange, high-stakes situation. As each of the friends narrates, a darker story of revenge, hidden crimes, and deadly impunity emerges. There is so much to like here: the complexity of the quartet's relationships, Jonasson's powerful, streamlined writing, and the parallels between an unforgiving setting and the characters' seething grudges. Readers will be drawn into Jonasson's forbidding Iceland landscape, where it's anyone's guess who will make it out alive.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this disappointing standalone from Jónasson (The Girl Who Died), Daníel, a struggling actor living in London, travels to Reykjavík to join three friends for a reunion: Helena, an engineer; Ármann, an entrepreneurial tour guide; and Gunnlaugur, a lawyer. Ármann has organized a hunting weekend, but things go massively wrong on the moors. A blizzard forces the group, with minimal gear, to shelter in a disused hunting hut, where they encounter something genuinely shocking (Daníel "had never been so afraid in his life"). The payoff for this early fright is a long time coming as the novel focuses on the foursome's backstories, which illuminate the motive for the expedition. It's a dandy premise, and Jónasson does a good job of connecting the dots, but the plot is built on a rickety foundation. Would an experienced and successful guide like Ármann be so ill prepared? He creates a decent amount of suspense and horror and is great at conveying the menace of an Icelandic winter, but some readers will find what happens too hard to swallow. Hopefully, Jónasson will return to form next time. Agent: David Headley, DHH Literary (U.K.).
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The ptarmigan hunt four old friends have planned for a winter weekend in the wilds of eastern Iceland goes south when the weather turns on them and they turn on each other. Three of the four--actor Daníel, attorney Gunnlaugur, and Helena, an engineer for a tech startup--would have no business traipsing around in the snow under any circumstances if it weren't for the fourth, Ármann, a travel guide with a checkered past as a drug user--turned-dealer whose underworld connections in Denmark might well have killed him if Helena hadn't ridden to the rescue. Once an unexpected snowstorm sends them searching desperately for a hut they can shelter in, it's gradually revealed that the others all have secrets of their own. Daníel can't stop lying about the fact that his career in London has never taken off. Helena's still mourning Víkingur, the ex who died under suspicious circumstances five years ago. And Gunnlaugur is an alcoholic rapist whose two years on the wagon come to an end inside the hut, where the refuge they've sought swiftly turns nightmarish with the discovery of an armed stranger inside. No matter what they do, the man won't move, won't talk, and won't put down his gun even when the group falls asleep. Soft-pedaling the supernatural trappings of The Girl Who Died (2021), Jónasson presents the weekend getaway as an excruciatingly slow-motion avalanche in which it's obvious from the beginning, as Helene says, that "something's got to die before we finish this trip"; the only questions are who, how many, under what circumstances, and at whose hands. A shivery delight. It's nice that the Icelandic Tourist Board hasn't paid Jónasson to quit publishing. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
