The Undesired

Starred review from November 28, 2016
Two tales of personal and familial anguish, decades apart, drive this chilling standalone from Icelandic author Sigurdardóttir (Someone to Watch over Me). In the present, single father Ódinn Hafsteinsson, who works for the State Supervisory Agency, investigates abuses that may have occurred during the 1970s at the Krókur care home for delinquent boys, located on a former farm in a remote part of Iceland. Those who were mistreated could be entitled to damages. Meanwhile, Ódinn fears that he caused his ex-wife’s death and that he has thus done irreparable psychic damage to his 11-year-old daughter, Rún, who suffers from nightmares involving her late mother. Flash back to 1974. Aldís, a teenage girl who’s estranged from her mother and performs grueling domestic duties at Krókur, becomes infatuated with Einar, a boy at the home with a terrible secret in his past. When Einar and another boy disappear, Aldís pays a terrible price. The two narratives converge on an exciting climax that testifies to Sigurdardóttir’s command of psychological nuance and bitter irony.

December 15, 2016
As in The Silence of the Sea (2016), Iceland's Queen of Crime juggles two sets of crimes in two time frames to produce a slow-burning, bone-chilling tale. Following the fatal heart attack of his co-worker Roberta Gunnarsdottir, Odinn Hafsteinsson, trained as a dispassionate engineer, is asked to take over her investigative report on the half-century history of the Krokur care home for troubled young men. Odinn, already presented as dying along with his 11-year-old daughter, Run, in the prologue, soon follows Roberta in zeroing in on the deaths of Einar Allen and Thorbjorn Jonasson, two Krokur boys who were found in a car dead of carbon monoxide poisoning some 40 years ago. As Odinn, who's been on edge ever since the sudden death of his ex-wife, Lara Karlsdottir, left him the sole guardian of Run, begins to piece together different accounts of the case, the author takes a shortcut ahead of him, going directly back to the January day in 1974 when Einar first arrives at Krokur. Cleaning woman Aldis Agnarsdottir instantly suspects that he's much too old to have been placed there--in fact, he turns out to be 18, legally an adult--but that sharp perception doesn't stop her from falling under his sway, since they're both in different ways victims of Veigar and Lilja, the home's tyrannical owners and mismanagers. As the two stories proceed in alternating chapters whose movement is as inexorable as that of the Titanic and the iceberg, the past will turn out to resonate in Odinn's investigation in ways that are as unexpected as they are shattering, with shocking new complications still foretold in the story's final paragraphs. "Someone always gets punished when a crime is committed," one character observes bitterly, "but not always the guilty party."Rest assured that the guilty and the innocent alike will share every punishment Sigurdardottir can dish out.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 1, 2017
When Odinn Hafsteinsson's ex-wife, Lara, dies, he becomes full-time father to 11-year-old Run. Determined to redress his history of lackluster parenting, Odinn trades his travel-intensive job for a sedate investigator position at the State Supervisory Agency, where he is assigned the case of the Krokur home for delinquent boys, which closed soon after two boys died in an accident there in 1974. Recent high-profile cases have revealed abuses in Icelandic foster-care homes, and Odinn is tasked with determining if any of Krokur's boys have a case against the state. Soon, uncooperative witnesses and the discovery of threats targeting the case's recently deceased former investigator breed a horrific certainty in Odinn that the boys were murdered. Sigurdardottir (The Silence of the Sea, 2015), a master at weaving in dark supernatural elements, sets the bureaucratic details of Odinn's investigation against the creepy atmosphere of the remote Krokur home and hints that Lara's ghost has returned to avenge her suspicious death. A twisty, haunting Scandinavian gem.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)