Last Rituals

After the body of a young German student—with his eyes cut out and strange symbols carved into his chest—is discovered at a university in Reykjavik, the police waste no time in making an arrest. The victim's family isn't convinced they have the right man, however, so they ask Thora Gudmundsdottir, attorney and single mother of two, to investigate. The fee is considerable—more than enough to make things a bit easier for the struggling lawyer and her children.

It's not long before Thora and Matthew Reich, her new associate, discover something unusual about the deceased student: He had been obsessed with the country's grisly history of torture, execution, and witch hunts—a topic made all the more peculiar by the fact that unlike witch hunts in other countries, those in Iceland had targeted men . . . not women.

As Thora and Matthew dig deeper, they make the connection between long-bygone customs and the student's murder. But the shadow of dark traditions conceals secrets in both the past and the present, and the investigators soon realize that nothing is as it seems . . . and that no one can be trusted.