Trap by Lilja Sigurðardóttir | Blog Tour Guest Post | (@lilja1972 @OrendaBooks) #Reykjavik Noir

Translated by Quentin Bates

Published by Orenda Books

Available in ebook and paperback (18 October 2018)

230 pages

My thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things tours and Orenda Books for the invitation to take part in the blog tour for Trap, Book #2 in the Reykjavik Noir series. For my turn today I have a guest from Lilja Sigurðardóttir.

 Sense of Character

I don’t have an excellent sense of place in my writing. Or at least I don’t think so. Many other Icelandic authors have a much better way of describing our country’s strange landscapes and weather, for example.

What I pride myself on is my sense of character. All my stories are based on the characters; I begin with them and end with them. The characters are the moving forces behind the story, and I feel I have a special connection with each and every one of them. My ideas always start with a character – a person who takes form and comes alive in my head. And I then start a kind of conversation with them.

This conversation is almost like a Q&A in which I ask the character what she or he wants and then try to figure out who else wants the same thing. Then I have either an ally for my character or a competitor. And if it is a competitor then I have a conflict and a story is born.

This description sounds very technical, but it really is not. The whole process is very organic and daydreamlike, the story takes many twists and turns that never find their way into a book and the characters do things in my imagination that they never end up doing in the final story.

But I think there is an element to this that makes it successful and creates a good sense of character in a story – and that is that I love my characters. They can be awful, murderous monsters, but even so, I, as their creator, have to love them for the story to work out.

I work on my main characters – the ones that have a point of view – until I can feel that I love them; because, until I do, I cannot let go of the story, cannot send it out to the world. But when I feel the love, I know that they will work out for the readers. And that is, of course, the most important thing.

|   About the Book   |

Happily settled in Florida, Sonja believes she’s finally escaped the trap set by unscrupulous drug lords. But when her son Tomas is taken, she’s back to square one … and Iceland.

Her lover, Agla, is awaiting sentencing for financial misconduct after the banking crash, and Sonja refuses to see her. And that’s not all … Agla owes money to some extremely powerful men, and they’ll stop at nothing to get it back.

Set in a Reykjavík still covered in the dust of the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption, and with a dark, fast-paced and chilling plot and intriguing characters, Trap is an outstandingly original and sexy Nordic crime thriller, from one of the most exciting new names in crime fiction.

|   About the Author  |

Icelandic crime-writer Lilja Sigurdardóttir was born in the town of Akranes in 1972 and raised in Mexico, Sweden, Spain and Iceland. An award-winning playwright, Lilja has written four crime novels, with Snare, the first in a new series, hitting bestseller lists worldwide. The film rights have been bought by Palomar Pictures in California. Lilja has a background in education and has worked in evaluation and quality control for preschools in recent years. She lives in Reykjavík with her partner.

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