The Lost House

• Author: Melissa Larsen
• Genre: Mystery
• Publication Date: January 14, 2025
• Publisher: Minotaur Books

Thank you to NetGalley and Minotaur Books for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

CONTENT WARNING: grief, death of a loved one (off-page), murder, death of a child, suicide attempt

In Melissa Larsen’s The Lost House comes the mesmerizing story of a young woman with a haunting past who returns to her ancestral home in Iceland to investigate a gruesome murder in her family.

Forty years ago, a young woman and her infant daughter were found buried in the cold Icelandic snow, lying together as peacefully as though sleeping. Except the mother’s throat had been slashed and the infant drowned. The case was never solved. There were no arrests, no conviction. Just a suspicion turned into a the husband did it. When he took his son and fled halfway across the world to California, it was proof enough of his guilt.

Now, nearly half a century later and a year after his death, his granddaughter, Agnes, is ready to clear her grandfather’s name once and for all. Still recovering from his death and a devastating injury, Agnes wants nothing more than an excuse to escape the shambles of her once-stable life—which is why she so readily accepts true crime expert Nora Carver’s invitation to be interviewed for her popular podcast. Agnes packs a bag and hops on a last-minute flight to the remote town of Bifröst, Iceland, where Nora is staying, where Agnes’s father grew up, and where, supposedly, her grandfather slaughtered his wife and infant daughter.

Is it merely coincidence that a local girl goes missing the very same weekend Agnes arrives? Suddenly, Agnes and Nora’s investigation is turned upside down, and everyone in the small Icelandic town is once again a suspect. Seeking to unearth old and new truths alike, Agnes finds herself drawn into a web of secrets that threaten the redemption she is hell-bent on delivering, and even her life—discovering how far a person will go to protect their family, their safety, and their secrets.

Set against an unforgiving Icelandic winter landscape, The Lost House is a chilling and razor-sharp thriller packed with jaw-dropping twists that will leave you breathless.

I’ve read a little bit of Scandinavian noir, and it’s a wonderful new world of books to read. I’m not really familiar with anything about Iceland other than it is beautiful, you can see the Northern Lights, and a bunch of my friends have gone there. Hearing that this book is a thriller set in a remote part of Iceland caught my attention, and I had to request it. Luckily, the gods of NetGalley were working in my favor.

To start with, the writing is fantastic. The remote and isolated town outside of Reykjavik was so wonderfully described that it felt like I needed to bundle up to read this. The landscape is harsh and stark, and it’s set during winter, so the characters are also facing a very snowy environment, and it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t like the snow we get here—it’s the kind where it’s nearly impossible to walk in, and simply being outside in the super cold temperatures can be fatal.

“The emptiness of the land seduces you into believing that you are alone, you are anonymous, when in fact it only makes you that much more exposed.”

Agnes is a tough character to like, and her morally gray tendencies explain why. She was the kind of person who I constantly wanted to shake some sense into, but at the same time, I could empathize with her. After a devastating accident last year, she became disabled, and that disability takes over her life. This is especially problematic for her because participating in physically active hobbies for fun and as a coping skill for the stresses of her life. Even more so because she is one of the small population of people who develop a substance use disorder as a result of the painkillers she was prescribed after multiple surgeries. Even the way she ruminates both on her physical pain and the next painkiller she can take felt realistic, and it’s clear that she is using that to avoid the emotional pain that she’s in, after losing her beloved grandfather, experiencing a breakup of a serious relationship, and the guilt that she carries over her accident and the consequences she faces for the rest of her life. The only thing that was missing was an obsessive counting of how many pills she has left, although the constant fight between taking a pill and getting clean is present throughout the book.

“Sitting in one set position for the past fourteen hours has sent her back to the early days of her recovery, when her worldview had contracted down to her left leg, and only her left leg.”

The disability and addiction representation in this book is done really well. I could really identify with Agnes on this level, as someone who also had a chronic illness that impairs my mobility. Just reading about the treks that Agnes made had me feeling like those descriptions could apply to me as well. Mental note: If I ever go to Iceland, make sure to stay close to the cities.

“Agnes struggles to keep up with his long stride. Each step is a debt owed to her body, unable to be repaid.”

“It’s not enough, not nearly enough, to ease her cravings. Just enough, she tells herself, to be a person.”

The story is told almost exclusively from the POV of Agnes, with the exception of a prologue chapter that is told in third person. I really enjoyed getting to learn about what happened during the two mysteries—one that happened 40 years ago and led her grandfather and father to flee to California, and then one in the present day, involving the disappearance of a college student in the town. There are some concerning similarities between the two cases, and Agnes happens to get caught up in both as she arrives in Bifröst to meet up with a true crime podcaster, Nora, who is doing a special show about the Frozen Madonna cold case on its fortieth anniversary. 

As Agnes makes her way around the town that her father was born in, she learns more about how they lived, the people who lived nearby, and the legacy left behind. Agnes had an extremely close relationship with her grandfather, while her father seems more aloof. However, her grandfather and father wouldn’t ever discuss anything that happened before they arrived in California. She grew up with no real knowledge of her paternal side’s family history, and her mother wasn’t in the picture. Having only known the sweet, loving, caring, and thoughtful grandfather, she arrives in Iceland convinced that she could help exonerate her grandfather of the murders by proving his innocence. In the process, she unwittingly finds herself involved in the disappearance of the college student on the annual party at what has become known as ‘the Murder House.’ 

It causes friction between her and her father, Magnús, because he doesn’t want her, or anyone else, to dig into their family history. But Agnes starts out the story at a personal low, and works her way through moire than just her family background in Iceland. She shows an impressive amount of personal growth, even while making bad choices. At least she learns from her mistakes, and makes different ones the next time. While this has the potential to seem repetitive, as someone who was able-bodied for decades. Fun fact: I was on the fencing team in both high school and college. I’ve experienced the grief associated with losing mobility all at once, and her fixation on her pain and pills could seem overdone to someone who hasn’t experienced this, but all of this is incredibly realistic. The way that her emotions are only starting to come out now that she’s trying to stop using but is still taking just enough to stave off the worst of the pain and the cravings.

“Because this isn’t just grief tearing her apart. There’s anger, too. Anger at her father. She’s come all this way to help her grandfather, to reconnect with him after his death, and her father hates her for it.”

I loved the idea of a hauntingly barren landscape featuring lava fields, with forest encroaching on the town. The remoteness of the location and how it is so cut off because of the winter weather made this entire small town with the illusion of privacy into a locked-room mystery that hopefully isn’t a murder, while racing against time and the Arctic cold to find the missing girl. Obviously Nora gets wrapped up in the investigation, as does Agnes. There’s so much character development in Agnes, while we see Nora’s tough exterior as well as her vulnerable side. 

Set against a backdrop of stunning natural beauty, the dual timeline mysteries are fascinating to see unravel, and although I guessed the culprit of one of the crimes, the other surprised me. There were some really good plot twists that I didn’t see coming at all, and some that I spotted relatively early, but it was such an immersive story that I was hooked from start to finish. Pacing is wonderfully done, offering little bits of information that constant change the direction of the story as the characters discover it, and keeping readers invested in both storylines by creating some tenuous links between the crimes. This fast-paced mystery kept me on the edge of my seat as the characters crept closer to the resolution of both a cold case that has taken on almost a cult-like following in true crime circles, and a present-day mystery that is gradually taking on a new importance to Agnes. Overall, this was done wonderfully, and I can’t wait to check out her other book, and see what she does in the future. I recommend this if you like mysteries, Scandinavian noir or settings, super atmospheric books that are so exciting it almost feels like claustrophobia kicks in as the full story becomes apparent, a mystery lead who has a disability that she doesn’t allow to hold her back anymore, and both historical and present day mysteries rolled into one messy scene.

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