Books Set in Cold Climates

Fiction

Jessica Auerbach, Winter Wife.
A young mother, isolated during a long, hard winter in a new city, relies on a sympathetic postman for support and advice.

Chris Bohjalian, Midwives.
Stranded in a rural home on an icy night, a midwife performs a caesarean on a woman she believes is dead in order to save the baby and is accused of causing the mother’s death.

Isabel Colegate, Winter Journey.
A woman visiting her brother at their family home in rural England has plans for him, the farm, and their frayed relationship.

Claire Davis, Winter Range.
A Montana sheriff who intervenes when a bankrupt rancher lets his cattle starve learns his wife was once involved with the man.

David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars.
On an island in Puget Sound in 1954, a reporter covering the trial of a Japanese-American fisherman accused of murder confronts the townspeople’s prejudice and his own feelings for the for defendant’s wife.

Sue Harrison, Mother Earth, Father Sky.
During the Ice Age, a young woman in the Aleutian Islands witnesses the massacre of her family, is forced to bear the child of her enemy, and embarks on a personal quest for survival and revenge.

Jon Hassler, North of Hope.
A priest returns home to Minnesota to preach Catholicism on the Ojibway reservation and finds his vocation tested by the despair around him and by a renewed love for a woman from his past.

Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale.
In a magical version of turn-of-the-century New York City, a burglar attempting to rob a mansion on the Upper West Side falls in love with the terminally ill daughter of the house and embarks on a
desperate personal journey to turn back time after her death.

Joseph Klempner, Flat Lake in Winter.
A lawyer emerges from his hermit-life existence to defend a mentally challenged boy who confessed to the brutal murder of his grandparents.

Lorna Landvik, Welcome to the Great Mysterious.
A Broadway star who’s been dumped by her boyfriend returns home to Minnesota to take care of her nephew while her sister takes a vacation.

Margaret Lawrence, Hearts and Bones.
In a small town in Maine where the scars of the Revolutionary War have not yet healed, a midwife discovers a murder that may have been committed by the father of her illegitimate child.

Alison McGhee, Shadow Baby.
A 12-year-old girl whose twin died during their birth in a blizzard befriends an old man in the Adirondack woods who also lost a sibling in a snowstorm.

Howard Norman, The Bird Artist.
In a remote fishing village on the frigid coast of Newfoundland, an artist who paints birds recounts the passion and betrayal that led him to murder a lighthouse keeper.

Tim O’Brien, Northern Lights.
Two brothers—one wounded in Vietnam and both haunted by memories of their father—embark on a cross-country ski trip that turns into a test of endurance and survival.

Stewart O’Nan, Snow Angels.
An adolescent coping with his parents’ divorce and the loss of their home is drawn into another
tragedy when he discovers the drowned child of the woman who used to be his babysitter.

Cathie Pelletier, The Weight of Winter.
As the first heavy snows of winter fall on the back-country Maine town of Mattagash, the town’s oldest resident dreams of her life and the history of her town and its people.

Scott Phillips, Ice Harvest.
A crooked lawyer encounters a variety of lowlifes during a Christmas Eve blizzard as he prepares to leave Wichita and go on the lam.

Rosamunde Pilcher, Winter Solstice.
Five lonely people from different backgrounds are brought together for the winter at a Scottish estate.

Christina Schwarz, Drowning Ruth.
After World War I, a nurse returns to her northern Wisconsin home and stays on to care for her niece when her sister falls through the ice and drowns in mysterious circumstances.


Mysteries

Rosemary Aubert, The Feast of Stephen.
During the harsh Toronto winter, former judge Ellis Portal investigates when several homeless people who liked to attend courtroom proceedings are found dead with Bible verses in their pockets.

Robert Barnard, Death in a Cold Climate.
A Norwegian detective investigates the death of an Englishman who came to Tromso, high above the Arctic Circle, to keep a secret rendezvous.

Lawrence Block, The Burglar in the Library.
Bernie Rhodenbarr heads to a country estate in the Berkshires to steal a Raymond Chandler first edition but finds himself snowbound with a killer.

Carol Higgins Clark, Iced.
A P.I. on vacation in Aspen investigates when valuable paintings and an old friend go missing.

K. C. Constantine, Upon Some Midnights Clear.
Western Pennsylvania police chief Mario Balzic looks into the alleged mugging of a little old lady for her Christmas Club money.

Mary Daheim, Snow Place to Die.
A bed & breakfast owner regrets that she agreed to cater the phone company’s annual winter retreat when the frozen corpse of last year’s caterer is found.

Carola Dunn, Death at Wentwater Court.
In post-World War I England, a peer’s daughter who takes a job writing articles about country manors is caught up in the investigation of blackmail & murder.

Kirsten Ekman, Under the Snow.
A police constable in Lapland tries to break a town’s conspiracy of silence when a man is killed at a mah-jongg party.

Aaron Elkins, Icy Clutches.
An anthropology professor on vacation in Alaska’s Glacier Bay uses his expertise to determine that a 30-year-old skeleton believed to be an avalanche victim was really murdered.

Dick Francis, Slay Ride.
An English Jockey Club investigator is sent to Norway when a British steeplechase jockey disappears.

Paula Gosling, Dead of Winter.
A home economics teacher joins forces with the town sheriff when a body is found in an ice fishing hole at a remote Great Lakes resort.

Patricia Hall, Dead of Winter.
A Yorkshire police detective unravels the mystery behind the drowning of an estate agent with the help of a reporter.

Steve Hamilton, A Cold Day in Paradise.
Cop-turned-P.I. Alex McKnight is baffled when it appears he’s being stalked by the man who shot his partner years ago and is supposedly in prison.

Jamie Harrison, Blue Deer Thaw.
When the spring thaw reveals several corpses around his small town, Montana sheriff Jules Clement must find the link.

Sue Henry, Murder on the Iditarod Trail.
An Alaskan State Trooper investigates when top dog sledders start dying in mysterious & gruesome ways.

Tami Hoag, Night Sins.
In a small Minnesota town, a young boy disappears without a trace save for a cruel, taunting note, and the case goes to an untested but tough-minded investigator and a local cop, who wonder if it is the work of a returned serial killer.

Peter Hoeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow.
A part-Inuit woman in Copenhagen uses her knowledge of snow to determine that her 6-year-old neighbor’s death was not an accident and uncovers a conspiracy that leads her to Greenland.

Susan Holtzer, Curly Smoke.
Ann Arbor computer consultant Anneke Haagen investigates the death of a neighbor who was found in a snowdrift after protesting a new office park.

Maureen Jennings, Except the Dying.
In the cold Toronto winter of 1895, a detective investigating the death a servant finds that several people connected to her are hiding something.

Stan Jones, White Sky, Black Ice.
A native Alaskan state trooper comes to understand his Eskimo heritage as he investigates suicides that may be the result of a shaman’s curse.

Stuart Kaminsky, A Cold Red Sunrise.
Porfiry Rostnikov of the Moscow police is sent to deepest Siberia when a commissar investigating the death of a dissident’s daughter is murdered.

Thomas Keneally, Victim of the Aurora.
On a 1910 expedition to Antarctica, a member of the team who was blackmailing his colleagues is murdered, leaving no shortage of suspects.

William Kent Krueger, Iron Lake.
A former sheriff in Minnesota investigates whether a judge’s suicide and his paper boy’s disappearance are connected.

Jane Langton, The Shortest Day.
Someone is killing the participants in the annual Christmas Revels at Harvard University and it’s up to retired detective Homer Kelly to figure out who.

Archer Mayor, The Marble Mask.
A frozen corpse found in a crevasse in Vermont turns out to be a big-time Canadian crime boss who disappeared after World War II.

Lise McClendon, Nordic Nights.
When her stepfather is accused of killing a Norwegian artist, an art dealer takes it upon herself to clear his name, only to find her life in danger.

Ellis Peters, The Virgin in the Ice.
When a group of travelers are lost in a snowstorm and one of them, a nun, is found dead in a frozen brook, Brother Cadfael tries to clear the name of a monk who claims he is guilty.

Sandra Prowell, When Wallflowers Die.
A man running for governor in Montana asks a P.I. to look into the long unsolved death of his wife.

Mary Monica Pulver, Original Sin.
A police chief must investigate the guests at his Christmas party when one of them is murdered and all the suspects are trapped in his house during a blizzard.

Bob Reiss, Purgatory Road.
One year after accidentally causing the death of his best friend, an Antarctic research scientist's sister is killed, & his subsequent unauthorized investigations result in his being charged with murder.

John Sanford, Winter Prey.
Detective Lucas Davenport is at his remote cabin in the Wisconsin woods when the local sheriff requests his help solving the grisly murder of a family.

Lisa Scottoline, Rough Justice.
Just as the jury is about to begin deliberations, a defense attorney’s client confesses to her that he killed a homeless man, not in self defense as he claimed, but in cold blood.

Kate Sedley, The Wicked Winter.
In medieval England, Roger the Chapman travels to Cederwell Manor to sell his wares but finds the lady of the house dead and himself snowbound.

Martin Cruz Smith, Gorky Park.
A Russian homicide investigator must deal with the KGB as he looks into the deaths of three people found dead in the snow in Moscow’s Gorky Park.

Dana Stabenow, A Cold-Blooded Business.
A private eye goes undercover among oil workers on the Trans-Alaska pipeline north of the Arctic Circle to uncover a drug ring.

Jonathan Stone, The Cold Truth.
An NYPD trainee heads to wintry upstate New York and teams with a legendary police chief to solve a baffling murder.

John Straley, Cold Water Burning.
As a storm bears down on the Alaskan coast, a P.I. seeks a missing man who was accused of killing four people on a boat three years earlier.

Peter Turnbull, Deep and Crisp and Even.
The cops of P Division hunt the snow-shrouded streets of Glasgow for the person who has knifed two victims and may kill again.

R. D. Wingfield, Frost at Christmas.
For Inspector Frost, the season is soured by a missing girl, a long-buried corpse, a reopened case, and his new assistant who’s the boss’s nephew.

Ted Wood, Snowjob.
A Canadian police chief heads to a Vermont ski town to help a friend who’s been framed for murder.

Deborah Woodworth, Death of a Winter Shaker.
Shaker Sister Rose Callahan investigates the death of an outsider who had claimed to be a believer to escape the cold and the Depression.

L. R. Wright, A Chill Rain in January.
Karl Alberg of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is drawn into the lives of two women hiding secrets.

Scott Young, Murder in a Cold Climate.
An Inuit Mountie tracks the murderer of a spokesman for Native rights across the frozen landscape of northern Canada.


Adventure

Andrea Barrett, Voyage of the Narwhal.
In 1855, the Narwhal sets out to find the lost polar expedition of Sir John Franklin and encounters danger and beauty in the northern seas.

James Cobb, Choosers of the Slain.
A Naval commander is called into action when Argentina tries to seize control of Antarctica.

Clive Cussler, Shock Wave.
Dirk Pitt is on his way to Antarctica’s Weddell Sea to find the source of a plague killing sea life when he discovers a party of cruise ship passengers stranded on an icy island.

Lionel Davidson, Kolymsky Heights.
A Canadian-Indian scholar treks across Siberia to a Russian research station where a scientist has information that could benefit or destroy the world.

William Dietrich, Ice Reich.
When a team of explorers sent to Antarctica by Goering discover a Norwegian ship whose crew all died of a hideous infectious disease, an American pilot and a German biologist must stop the Nazis from using this biological weapon against the Allies.

Jack Du Brul, Charon’s Landing.
A former KGB agent and a renegade Arab oil minister join forces to sabotage the Alaska oil pipeline in order to keep the U.S. dependent on OPEC, but an American geologist is determined to stop them.

Thomas Fleming, Dreams of Glory.
During the winter of 1780, American troops struggle with hunger, bitter cold and low morale while across the Hudson in New York City British troops live in comfort as their leaders plot to kidnap George Washington and put an end to the revolution.

Clare Francis, Wolf Winter.
During the Cold War, a Norwegian woman seeking an explanation for her husband’s death on Soviet land finds answers dating back to the Nazi era.

Brian Freemantle, Dead Men Living.
British agent Charlie Muffin and his ex-KGB agent lover Natalia unravel a World War II era secret in the Siberian tundra that Britain, America and Russia are desperate to keep under wraps.

Payne Harrison, Thunder of Erebus.
A joint Soviet-American research project in Antarctica turns into all-out war when both sides want exclusive claim to a motherlode of an element crucial to a new strategic defense system.

James Houston, The Ice Master.
Two whaling ship captains, a brash Yankee and a young Newfoundlander, clash during their year-long stay among the Inuit of Baffin Island.

Dean Koontz, Icebound.
A secret Arctic experiment turns into a frozen nightmare when a team of scientists, stranded on a drifting iceberg with a massive explosive charge, battle the elements for survival, only to discover
that one of them is a murderer.

Louis L’Amour, Last of the Breed.
When an Air Force major’s experimental aircraft is forced down in Russia, he uses the survival skills of his Native American ancestors on an arduous trek across Siberia to the Bering Strait.

Ursula Le Guin, Left Hand of Darkness.
A Terran ambassador travels to the frozen world of Gethen, where he encounters an androgynous
race who challenge his concept of gender.

Alistair MacLean, Ice Station Zebra.
An American submarine sent to rescue a British meteorological team stranded on the polar ice cap is caught up in espionage, sabotage and murder.

James Marshall, White-Out.
The sole survivor of a World War II mission to the Antarctic shares his extraordinary story of survival after a German U-boat destroyed their camp.

Glenn Meade, Snow Wolf.
When Eisenhower receives word that Stalin is about to set off a third world war, he sends two CIA agents, posing as man and wife, to trek across the icy wastes of Russia to assassinate the despot.

Richard Moran, Empire of Ice.
An active volcano surfaces in the Atlantic Ocean, spewing a cloud of ash that plunges the British Isles into a deep freeze, and while the IRA takes advantage of the resulting chaos, a geophysicist & a biosphere scientist race to save their country.

Peter Nichols, Voyage to the North Star.
A bored millionaire seeking adventure sails his ill-equipped luxury yacht to the Arctic Ocean to hunt big game, while the disgraced sea captain he hired for the journey must call on all his skills to save his employer from his own folly.

James Powlick, Meltdown.
When the crew of an environmental research vessel in the Arctic Ocean start dying of radiation
poisoning, a scientist calls on her oceanographer ex-husband to help her discover the source of the leak somewhere under the polar ice.

David Poyer, The Circle.
An Annapolis graduate is assigned to an aging destroyer on a mission to the Arctic Circle, where the extreme weather, a renegade nuclear sub, a corrupt executive officer and an incompetent crew test his limits.

Doug Preston & Lincoln Child, The Ice Limit.
On a desolate, frozen island off the coast of Chile, an expedition funded by an eccentric billionaire attempts to recover the largest meteorite ever discovered.

Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, Icefire.
A Navy SEAL and an oceanographer race to save the world from an environmental disaster when terrorists cause a massive tidal wave by detonating nuclear warheads on Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf.

Matthew Reilly, Ice Station.
A team of Marines race to be the first on the scene when several American scientists disappear after discovering a strange object in the Antarctic ice.

David Robbins, War of the Rats.
During the bitter winter of 1942-43 in war-torn Stalingrad, a German sniper and a Russian sniper hunt one another.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica.
A man is sent to Antarctica to investigate rumors of environmental sabotage by a group trying to drive humans off the continent.

Audrey Schulman, The Cage.
A nature photographer joins an expedition to northern Canada to take pictures of polar bears, but the team members soon learn how ill-equipped they are to deal with the severe conditions of the bears’ natural habitat.

Scott Smith, A Simple Plan.
Three men discover a crashed airplane carrying $4 million and concoct a plan to keep the money, a decision that leads them into a downward spiral of blackmail, deceit, and murder.

Wilbur Smith, Hungry as the Sea.
A former shipping magnate reduced to captaining a salvage tugboat gets a chance to redeem himself on a daring rescue of 600 passengers stranded on a cruise ship in the frozen wastes of Antarctica.

Paula Volsky, The Wolf of Winter.
A young woman and her brother return from exile to claim the throne from the necromancer who killed their family.

Robin White, Siberian Light.
The mayor of a remote town on the Siberian taiga is ordered to investigate a triple murder and uncovers a chilling secret.

Stephen White, Private Practices.
After a hostage situation in his office ends in death, Boulder psychologist Alan Gregory learns that one of the victims was the second witness at an upcoming trial to die in strange circumstances.

Richard Woodman, Arctic Treachery.
In 1803, Nathaniel Drinkwater and his crew are sent to protect whaling ships off the coast of Greenland, but the loss of one of the vessels sets off a train of disaster, death & treachery in the remote sea.


Nonfiction

Caroline Alexander, The Endurance.
The gripping survival story of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s disastrous journey to Antarctica, where his ship and crew became stranded in the polar ice for two years, until their outrageous bid to reach South Georgia Island across 900 miles of sea in a small boat.

Leonard Guttridge, The Ghosts of Cape Sabine.
The harrowing story of the 1884 expedition to establish a scientific base in Lady Franklin Bay from which only six men out of twenty-five returned alive.

Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air.
This first-hand account of the fatal attempt by a group of amateur climbers to scale Mount Everest in May 1996 is a riveting, heartbreaking, unforgettable read.

Piers Paul Read, Alive.
The survivors of a plane crash in the frozen Andes clung to life with extraordinary tenacity and made the most difficult decision in order to cheat starvation.

Colin Thubron, In Siberia.
The author describes his tours of Russian regions that have long captured the Western imagination, revealing the breathtaking natural beauty, tragic history, and vast spaces that make up Siberia.