Marianne’s Pick of the Week: The Lost House by Melissa Larsen

No one wants to be the bad guy, and so we distort facts to suit our images of ourselves, and we do this so often that eventually, the lie becomes the truth. – The Lost House

There are time when I want to curl up and read a dark, complicated book. My longing for just a bit of noir drove me to pick up Melissa Larsen’s sophomore novel, The Lost House.

In this Icelandic tale we meet Agnes, a woman who experienced a life altering accident and has spent the past year in rehab. Now addicted to prescription pain killers, she is desperately seeking a way to rid herself of this addiction and manage the debilitating pain of a shattered shin and knee.

Nora, a true crime podcaster, invites Agnes to Iceland to provide some background for a double murder, cold case investigation. Agnes jumps at the chance. It doesn’t hurt that the victims of this unsolved crime are her grandmother and infant aunt.  The police believe that Agnes’s grandfather murdered his wife after she (in either a state of post-partum depression or the desire to end her marriage) killed her child. Agnes cannot believe that the grandfather she knows and loves could commit such a crime. Her overarching desire is to clear her recently deceased grandfather’s name.

When Agnes arrives in Iceland, a college student who eerily resembles Agnes’s grandmother goes missing. Agnes and Nora get dragged into trying to solve this crime as well as the case of Agnes’s grandmother.

We explore and dive into the grief and trauma these deaths caused Agnes’s grandfather and father (who was a young boy at the time of the deaths).  Their refusal to discuss these incidents leads Agnes to all sorts of assumptions about these folks’ characters. Family secrets emerge.  Larsen deftly explores how denying pain and trauma impacts us and those around us.

The whodunit is slowly revealed. I guessed incorrectly a few times. The ending is ultimately satisfying and makes sense.  Larsen paints both the landscape and the characters in vivid colors.  We empathize with their pain; feel their angst.

Readers of Jo Nesbo’s Killing Moon  or The Darkness by Ragnar Jonasson will want to grab this one!