Thora Gudmundsdottir Books in Order

The Thora Gudmundsdottir novels follow an Icelandic lawyer who keeps finding herself at the centre of the country’s strangest crimes. Thora lives in Reykjavik, raises two children, and runs a small law practice, but her cases rarely stay confined to tidy contracts and routine disputes.

Thora is divorced and constantly negotiating life with her ex husband Hannes, her teenage son Gylfi, and her younger daughter Soley. Money is often tight, her parents are opinionated, and her office is small. Those pressures give the books a grounded, everyday feel, even when the plot leans toward medieval torture devices, ghost stories, or shipwreck legends.

In Last Rituals, Thora’s world widens when she is hired by the family of a murdered German student whose body is found at the University of Iceland, his eyes removed and occult symbols carved into his skin. Working alongside Matthew Reich, a blunt German investigator and later romantic partner, she digs into Iceland’s history of witch-hunts and the obsessions of a modern student clique.

The second book, My Soul to Take, sends Thora to a new age spa on the Snæfellsnes peninsula after its owner fears the property is haunted and then becomes a suspect in a brutal beachside killing. Ashes to Dust shifts to the Westman Islands, where houses buried by a 1973 volcanic eruption are being excavated and a basement full of decades-old bodies forces Thora to untangle what really happened on the night the lava came.

Later cases push her even farther from home. In The Day Is Dark, Thora and Matthew travel to a remote mining camp in Greenland to investigate missing workers and a project on the brink of collapse, surrounded by hostile weather and unnerving local legends. Someone to Watch Over Me pulls her back to Reykjavik, where she is asked to review the conviction of a young man with Down syndrome for a lethal care home fire, raising hard questions about how the justice system treats society’s most vulnerable residents.

By The Silence of the Sea, Thora is dealing with the aftermath of Iceland’s financial crash as well as a truly uncanny case, a luxury yacht that crashes into Reykjavik harbour with no one aboard. Hired by grieving grandparents, she has to reconstruct a voyage where a family and crew vanished at sea, while rumours of a cursed vessel refuse to fade.

Across the series, readers can expect intricate plots, a strong sense of place, and a thread of dry humour that runs through even the bleakest situations. Each book stands alone as a mystery, but reading in order lets you watch Thora’s relationships, especially with her children and with Matthew, develop alongside Iceland’s changing social and economic landscape.