Canadian Writers Abroad

Isabel Huggan Reviews
Death on the Island (Simon & Schuster, 2025) by Eliza Reid

Until recently, reading mysteries had been low on my list, having long held the notion that reading should be a more serious affair than having fun solving imaginary murders by imaginary people. However, influenced by a brief essay on this popular type of fiction by Emily Urquhart in the Literary Review of Canada, I too have now turned to Louise Penny and am becoming a fan of the genre, particularly in the gentrified fashion which owes much to the Agatha Christie school of plotting. I understand now the basic plan: a murder already committed with the threat of another one in the wings, a group of slightly related characters, and the satisfying moment in which said group is brought together for a complicated and elaborate denouement. Huge fun, and perhaps the best part for me was that this had none of the sickening darkness of Nordic Noir.

Thus equipped, I greeted the new mystery, Death on the Island (Simon & Schuster, 2025), with warm enthusiasm, especially as I felt I knew – if only by reading her words – the author herself, Eliza Reid. Just three years ago, I’d read with pleasure and admiration her book about Iceland’s women, Secrets of the Sprakkar, and reviewed it here for Canadian Writers Abroad. A writer with a clear, concise style, able to transmit well documented information easily — I was sure these journalistic attributes would be useful for setting up a scenario in which murder was at the heart.

And indeed, Eliza Reid proves in Death on the Island that she has done her research impeccably. She clearly understands the form itself and, as she is a skilled writer, able to thicken the plot with precise information about Iceland itself, its people, cuisine, history and current society. In her role as the wife of Iceland’s president for his four-year term, she must have absorbed useful information about diplomatic procedures, commerce and financial gain at the heart of intercontinental politics.

She draws her characters with such distinctive colouring that even with some names being unusual or Icelandic, it is easy to create visual images to follow the plot. We see the action from many points of view as the central drama unfolds over the course of three days, and quickly establish “who’s who” in some kind of moral ordering. In this kind of mystery-drama, the author teases us to “trust”, and as we read we fear that we trust the wrong ones… Reid has some fun, setting up false clues and taking us in several directions but always as a way of enriching the novel with pertinent description of place.

The main voice is that of Jane, wife of the Canadian ambassador to Iceland, but we also come very close to many other characters as the mystery unfolds, some seeming “good” to start and turning out otherwise — and the reverse is true as well. Just when you think, “yes, there’s no question it is X who did it,” Reid slips in some kind of proof it could not possibly have been X, must have been Y. Or Z.  

Her most effective device,  and I must say it kept me turning pages,  is the inclusion of chapter sub-heads — for example, Chapter Sixteen: Twenty-five  hours before he dies…. Chapter Thirty-Three: One hour before he dies. Already reading as if watching a television serial, which the novel is apparently destined to become, as currently there is great public hunger for distant northern settings for murder mysteries (see Shetland as an example).

As the novel draws to a close, the killer appears to be apprehended but,  just to twirl you again around her clever finger, Reid adds an epilogue. Some emotional resolutions are set in place, but we’re given a sense there’s more to come.

Absolutely a perfect summer read!

Isabel Huggan, author of two short story collections and a prize-winning memoir (Belonging: Home Away From Home), spent 33 years  abroad in Kenya, the Philippines and France, finally returning to Canada in 2020. She now lives in Orillia, Ontario, from where she occasionally sends out poems, reviews and essays, most often to the Literary Review of Canada or The New Quarterly, and also continuing her longtime connection with Canadian Writers Abroad.

Further

• Isabel Huggan, “Portrait of a Reader,” Literary Review of Canada.
• “Isabel Huggan’s Writing Space,” The New Quarterly.
• CBC announcement of the 2004 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, for Belonging.
• RBC Taylor Prize’s demise in 2020 as reported in the Toronto Star.
• Isabel Huggan’s author page at Penguin Random House Canada.
• Eliza Reid will be promoting her book at the Cabot Trail Writers’ Festival, at the Knowlton Literary Festival, and in Reykjavik.