Author of the bestselling Thora Gudmundsdottir crime series and several stand-alone thrillers, Yrsa Sigurdardottir was born in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1963 and works as a civil engineer. She made her crime fiction debut in 2005 with Last Rituals, the first instalment in the Thora Gudmundsdottir series. The second instalment in the series, My Soul to Take, was short-listed for the 2010 Shamus Award. In 2011, her stand-alone horror novel I Remember You was awarded the Icelandic Crime Fiction Award and was nominated for The Glass Key. Her novel The Silence of the Sea won the Petrona Award in 2015.

The Undesired

Aldis is working in a juvenile detention centre in rural Iceland. She witnesses something deeply disturbing in the middle of the night; soon afterwards, two of the boys at the centre are dead. Decades later, single father Odinn is looking into alleged abuse at the centre following the unexplained death of the colleague who was previously running the investigation. The more he finds out, though, the more it seems the odd events of the 1970s are linked to the accident that killed his ex-wife. Was her death something more sinister?