The ink on her arm was dry and Stella let go of her wrist. Úrsúla laid her arm against her chest as Stella had told her to, and closed her eyes. Whether it was the rune’s power or not, she felt a new energy swell inside her.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks to my translator, publisher, editor, designers and all the others who have made it possible for this book to be published in the English language. But first and foremost, thank you to all the women who enter politics with the vision to better our societies. Writing this book made me realise how much courage it takes to do your jobs.
—Lilja Sigurðardóttir
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Icelandic crime-writer Lilja Sigurðardóttir was born in the town of Akranes in 1972 and raised in Mexico, Sweden, Spain and Iceland. An award-winning playwright, Lilja has written seven crime novels, with Snare, the first in the Reykjavík Noir series, hitting bestseller lists worldwide. Trap was published in 2018, and was a Guardian Book of the Year, and Cage, winner of Icelandic Crime Novel of the Year, followed in 2019. The film rights for the series have been bought by Palomar Pictures in California. In 2020 Betrayal was shortlisted for the Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel. Lilja lives in Reykjavík with her partner.
Follow Lilja:
Twitter: @lilja1972
Instagram: www.instagram.com/sigurdardottirlilja/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/sigurdardottir.lilja
Website: www.liljawriter.com
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Quentin Bates escaped English suburbia as a teenager, jumping at the chance of a gap year working in Iceland. For a variety of reasons, the gap year stretched to a gap decade, during which time he went native in the north of Iceland, acquiring a new language, a new profession as a seaman, and a family, before they decamped en masse to England. He worked as a truck driver, teacher, net-maker and trawlerman at various times before falling into journalism, largely by accident. He is the author of a series of crime novels set in present-day Iceland (Frozen Out, Cold Steal, Chilled to the Bone, Winterlude, Cold Comfort, Thin Ice and Cold Breath) which have been published worldwide. He has translated Ragnar Jónasson’s Dark Iceland series for Orenda Books. Visit him on Twitter @graskeggur or on his website: graskeggur.com
Other titles by Lilja Sigurðardóttir.
available from Orenda Books
Snare
Trap
Cage
COPYRIGHT
Orenda Books
16 Carson Road
West Dulwich
London SE21 8HU
www.orendabooks.co.uk
First published in Icelandic as Svik by Forlagið in 2018
First published in English by Orenda Books in 2020
Copyright © Lilja Sigurðardóttir, 2018
English translation copyright © Quentin Bates, 2020
Lilja Sigurðardóttir has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–1–913193–40–9
eISBN 978–1–913193–41–6
The publication of this translation has been made possible through the financial support of
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