Eva Björg Ægisdóttir Books in Order

If you want the full Elma story: The Creak on the Stairs → Girls Who Lie → Night Shadows → You Can't See Me
If you like cold, small-town police procedurals: The Creak on the Stairs → Girls Who Lie
If you want her standalone suspense first: Home Before Dark

Eva Björg Ægisdóttir was born in 1988 and raised in Akranes, a coastal town in West Iceland, about half an hour from Reykjavík. That small-town background turned out to matter, because Akranes later became the setting for the crime novels that first introduced many readers to her work. She was a bookish kid long before she was a published writer. She has said that her early writing life was full of diaries and half-finished stories, and as a teenager she won a short story contest that gave the dream of becoming an author a real push.

Before fiction took over, Ægisdóttir followed a more academic route. She completed a bachelor's degree in sociology, then moved to Trondheim, Norway, where she earned a master's degree in Globalisation.

When she moved back to Iceland in 2015, she decided it was time to stop talking about writing a novel and actually write one. She was already a mother, so instead of settling into a standard office job she took work as a flight attendant, which gave her the flexibility to carve out writing time. In nine months, she finished the first draft of her debut.

That gamble paid off.

Her first novel, The Creak on the Stairs, won the Blackbird Award in 2018 and, after its English-language publication in 2020, went on to win the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger in 2021. It also launched the Forbidden Iceland series, which has since been translated into more than twenty languages.

At the center of those books is detective Elma, who returns to Akranes after a failed relationship in Reykjavík and finds that going home does not make life simpler. Elma is sharp and steady, but she is not written as some larger-than-life genius. Because she is working cases in the place where she grew up, every investigation comes with local history, family ties, and the discomfort of being known.

Readers usually come to Ægisdóttir for the mystery, but they stay for the pressure underneath it. In Girls Who Lie, Night Shadows, You Can't See Me, and Boys Who Hurt, she keeps returning to buried secrets, damaged families, shame, gossip, and the way old harm can keep shaping the present. Even when the books are clearly police procedurals, they often carry the close, uneasy feeling of psychological suspense.

Akranes is never just a backdrop.

That may be the clearest thread running through her fiction. The town is small enough for memories to stick and rumors to travel, which means the crimes in these books are never only about clues. They are also about what a community chooses to forget, who gets protected, and what it costs to tell the truth.

Ægisdóttir now lives in Reykjavík with her husband and their three children. Alongside the Elma novels she has also written the standalone thriller Home Before Dark, and The Creak on the Stairs has been optioned for television. Her books are rooted in Iceland, but the feelings driving them are easy to recognize anywhere, grief, secrecy, fear, and the stubborn hope that the truth might still matter.