Review: "The Lost House" by Melissa Larsen

The Lost House by Melissa Larsen
Published January 2025 via Minotaur Books
★★★

Agnes has grown up knowing that her family is Icelandic—and knowing that her father and grandfather left after a terrible tragedy for which her grandfather was blamed. They've never been willing to talk about it, never been back. But now an investigative podcast has pulled Agnes to Iceland to learn more—the podcast, and Agnes's own, smaller-scale tragedy, which she is fighting to recover from.

In an Icelandic winter, nothing is what she knows and nothing is quite what she expects: the cold permeates everything and everywhere; some of the locals view her as a reincarnation of her murdered grandmother, while others view her as a the granddaughter of a murderer (and thus suspicious herself); her father's childhood home is in falling-down shambles; she herself can't quite decide what to believe about her grandfather...and a local girl has gone missing, and the race is on to find her.

I read this for the setting, mostly: give me murder mysteries in far-off places I'd love to visit, and give me female writers and female main characters and a combination of a cold (in every sense of the word) case and a current case, and yes please. (I don't want to die in the woods in sparsely populated lands. I don't want almost anyone to die in the woods in sparsely populated lands! ...but I'd like a lot of fiction about just that, thanks.) And I'm here for just how much of a role cold plays here. I don't always love Agnes: she is deeply, deeply self-centered at times, pushing her own trauma on people who have other reasons to be traumatized and are not necessarily in a place to hear and empathize with a stranger's story. I'd also have loved to see a bit more explanation of the way people treat her in Iceland—some see her as something of a reincarnation of her grandmother, while others associate her only with her grandfather, and how they view her makes a pretty wild difference in how they treat and speak to her. The coincidence of a young woman going missing around the time that Agnes arrives feels a little played up; there's really no reason for anyone to think that there's any connection to Agnes, so though of course it complicates her time there, the connections feel a bit contrived.

Still, a nice wintery read. One to read from the comfort of one's heated home in the dead of the dark and the dark of the winter night...

Thanks to the author and publisher for inviting me to read a review copy through NetGalley.