The timing of the publication of THE UNDESIRED in the United States --- on the back end of the middle of winter --- could not be better. Reading this fine, brooding and atmospheric piece as the wind howls through the eaves makes for as good an evening of solitude as one could wish for. Author Yrsa Sigurdardottir, known primarily for her series of novels featuring Reykjavik attorney Thóra Gudmundsdôttir, has crafted a fine, slow-boil stand-alone work that will have you up all night. And that’s after you read the book.

Sigurdardottir begins THE UNDESIRED with a hair-raising preview of its conclusion before delivering the book’s primary plots along parallel tracks in different points of time. In the present, we meet Odinn Hafsteinsson, a bored, unassuming and, yes, somewhat underachieving lower level bureaucrat barnacled to a somewhat outmoded government agency that has less and less to do. Odinn is assigned to complete an investigation that had been commenced by a co-worker who recently passed away. There have been allegations of mistreatment at what was known as the Krókur Care Home, a residential home for delinquent boys that had operated in rural Iceland in the 1970s about an hour away from Reykjavik.

"Sigurdardottir’s pacing is wonderful, and the manner in which she insinuates terrible things will have you imagining that those bumps in the night are just what they are: bad news."

The past concerns an over-the-shoulder look at Krókur in 1974, with a kitchen employee --- a younger woman named Aldis --- as the tour guide. The taciturn married couple who run the farm are warehousing more than rehabilitating its residents, who, for the most part, are teenage boys charged with misdemeanors. While they aren’t angels, they are hardly hardened criminals, either, at least when they begin their stay at Krókur. That all changes, though, with the arrival of a boy who, in the words of one of the other characters, “messed up big time.” As the narrative progresses, we learn that things weren’t exactly wonderful at the Krókur Care Home to begin with.

Sigurdardottir --- aided by a fine translation by Victoria Cribb --- drops little breadcrumbs of terror and menace throughout the narratives, past and present, as they alternate chapters throughout the book. Odinn, a divorcée who is a single father of a middle-school-aged daughter, initially goes through the motions of his investigation, which will determine whether the former residents of the Krókur Care Home suffered any long-term after effects as the result of abuse and/or mistreatment while they were there, and if so, whether they were entitled to compensation. Odinn’s daughter has her own issues that are the result of her mother’s sudden and (apparently) accidental death, and it doesn’t help that some increasingly strange things are happening in the Hafsteinsson house.

By the time the narrative reaches the point previewed at the beginning of the book, the reader isn’t surprised but is really creeped out. Sigurdardottir’s pacing is wonderful, and the manner in which she insinuates terrible things will have you imagining that those bumps in the night are just what they are: bad news.

THE UNDESIRED is great reading for those who like to be frightened slowly by the darker corners of the human psyche. It also serves as a terrific introduction to Sigurdardottir’s other work, several volumes of which have been published in the United States.