The mystery is not the murders in the book but what the author is doing with and to her protagonist

Regarding The Day is Dark by Yrsa Sigurdardottir. I posted on this earlier when I was half way through the book.

This is number four in the series and I have read the first and maybe one other of the beginning three. I enjoyed her debut book in the series but am noticing something in this fourth one that I don't recall seeing in the first three.

A seeming deliberate subversion of the integrity of her own female protagonist.

[snip]

In all three instances the subversion takes the form of a female protagonist who behaves in some ways just like a male detective protagonist for most the time. But at some point, the author seems compelled to introduce a couple of devices.

[snip]

The second device that parallels the first is an attempt by the author to accentuate the femininity of the protagonist which, to me, always reads as an exercise in tropes and stereotypes. The protagonist becomes obsessed with their relations with a male, they focus on their appearance, they need a female confidant, they dither, they do stupid things like getting drunk and having sex with someone they intended not to. I think in the author's mind they are trying to reinforce the fact that this is not a male protagonist who happens to have a female body. They want it clear that it is a female psyche (however we might identify that) in a female body and therefore they are trying to build up the female factor. But in doing so, it comes across as heavy handed stereotyping and a casting of the protagonist as a helpless victim.

Well poor old Thóra Gudmundsdóttir (the Icelandic protagonist) remained subverted throughout.

I continued reading because I enjoyed the first book and because this one is set in Greenland and the number of books I have read about Greenland or set in Greenland I can number on one hand.

And despite what the author was doing to her protagonist, the rest of the story was moderately well plotted. Sufficiently interesting to finish.

Having finished, there is one further insight.

Not only was the protagonist subverted but she was unnecessary. The mystery would have been solved with or without Thóra Gudmundsdóttir's presence in the story. That was kind of unexpected.

She does not uncover clues which would not have been discovered. She takes no action which would not otherwise have occurred to yield the answer. She performs no feat of logic, induction, discovery or insight which would not have otherwise occurred. She was completely superfluous to the plot.

Is this all completely unconscious on the part of the author? Does she have an ulterior motive? Is she trying to dispense with Thóra Gudmundsdóttir as Doyle once tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes once he became bored with him?

No idea. The real mystery here is not the murders in the book but what the author is doing with and to her protagonist.