I Remember You

January 27, 2014
Two cases of vanished children propel this meticulously plotted supernatural thriller from Icelandic author Sigurdardottir (Ashes to Dust). In the first, a trio of travelers to the isolated Westfjords village of Hesteyri are thwarted in their efforts to renovate a home they have purchased by a dangerously mischievous spectral child. In the second, psychiatrist Freyr and police detective Dagný investigate the vandalizing of a grade school in Ísafjördur and uncover clues that recall a similar incident at the school 60 years before that occurred shortly after the unsolved disappearance of one of its pupils. Delving into the past, Freyr finds a string of bizarre deaths that claimed the schoolboy’s classmates in adulthood. Though incidents in the Hesteyri thread become a little static and repetitive compared to the complicated fact-sifting Ísafjördur thread, the author draws both strands of her story together for an unpredictable finale that blends the best aspects of the tale of mystery and the tale of the supernatural.

Starred review from February 1, 2014
In a departure from her series featuring lawyer Thora Gudmundsdottir, Iceland's queen of suspense combines modern crime detection with mysticism to chilling effect. The sense of foreboding starts early, as married couple Katrin and Gardar, along with Lif, the widow of Gardar's best friend, travel from Reykjavik to isolated Hesteyri to renovate the old house they've bought to turn into a guesthouse. Concerns about finances and the viability of the project pale as something about the house makes the trio want to leave it. Across the fjord, psychiatrist Freyr starts working with police on the unlikely connection between an elderly suicide victim and a six-year-old boy who disappeared three years earlier and was never found. Inevitably the two plotlines collide, revealing human behavior and failingslies, betrayals, assaults, murderthat explain only part of what has happened from a time decades earlier to the present. Sigurdardottir skillfully builds the early ominous warnings to the point that readers find themselves shouting to Katrin to cut her losses and go home, as the unexplained becomes terrifying. Nordic mystery writers can raise goosebumps as few others can, and Sigurdardottir shows she's one of the best.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

March 15, 2014
Sigurdardottir's work (The Day Is Dark, 2013, etc.) has always drawn on both kinds of mysteries--detective stories in which everything is explained rationally and supernatural thrillers in which it isn't--but this tale of a series of disappearances grounded in long-simmering revenge mixes the two more inextricably than ever before. Freyr, a consulting psychiatrist who's been called to the scene of a schoolroom that's been vandalized, finds nothing unusual about the way it's been trashed and defaced by the word "dirty," until he learns that the same thing happened to the same room 60 years ago. This apparent coincidence is rendered even more uncanny when Halla, a pensioner who was traumatized as a schoolchild by the earlier incident, hangs herself from a church ceiling--and when Freyr and his lover, Dagny, a police detective, learn of the high mortality rate among Halla's classmates, none of whom died from natural causes. Meanwhile, in remote Hesteyri, an unemployed Reykjavik MBA, his schoolteacher wife and their widowed friend, who plan to rehab a disused building as a guesthouse, have a series of increasingly creepy run-ins with what seems to be a young boy's ghost. Crosscutting between the two stories, Sigurdardottir counterpoints the progress of the investigation into the schoolroom vandalism and its implications with the deterioration of the relations among the three rehabbers, whose encounters with the ghost become more dangerous as they learn more and more unwelcome news about each other. By the time one of them vanishes, Freyr's realization that the vandalism case, which you'd think would be altogether safer, is linked to his own diabetic son's more recent disappearance turns his investigation into an anguished search for the truth of his own life. A multilayered tale that builds slowly--the use of smells is especially effective--but drives to a shattering climax that honors the traditions of both detective fiction and ghost stories.

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Starred review from December 1, 2013

Icelandic author Sigurdardottir departs from her Thora Gudmundsdottir mystery series (The Day Is Dark) with this stand-alone supernatural mystery. Three friends purchase a rundown house in a remote Icelandic village with the intention of renovating it into a guesthouse. They arrive by boat during the frigid off-season and find that the isolated town is abandoned for the winter and that their house is lacking any modern comforts such as electricity or running water. What could make things even worse? A ghost may be trying to kill them. Elsewhere in the country, Freyr, a psychologist still grieving for his missing son, is called to the scene of a vandalized school to help profile the perpetrator. Then he begins to find links among the school, his current patients, and his son's disappearance, while his ex-wife warns him that the ghost of his son is trying to contact him. Disbelieving yet shaken, Freyr tries to piece together the clues of the past and current events, leading him to that rundown house. VERDICT Sigurdardottir has written an excellent and seriously scary mystery with tangible and supernatural elements that will appeal to fans of John Ajvide Lindqvist (Let the Right One In).--Melissa DeWild, Kent District Lib., Comstock Park, MI

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