Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Five top winter mysteries and thrillers

Sarah Pearse lives by the sea in South Devon with her husband and two daughters. She studied English and Creative Writing at the University of Warwick and worked in Brand PR for a variety of household brands. After moving to Switzerland in her twenties, she spent every spare moment exploring the mountains in the Swiss Alpine town of Crans Montana, the dramatic setting that inspired her novel. Pearse has always been drawn to the dark and creepy – remote spaces and abandoned places – so when she read an article in a local Swiss magazine about the history of sanatoriums in the area, she knew she’d found the spark of the idea for her debut novel, The Sanatorium.

At CrimeReads she tagged five favorite frozen mysteries and thrillers, including:
The Snowman, by Jo Nesbø

The Snowman is a thrilling slice of Nordic Noir that kept me turning the pages well into the night. Jo Nesbo needs no introduction nor does one of his most popular characters, Norwegian Detective Harry Hole. In The Snowman, a boy called Jonas wakes up one morning after the first snowfall of the year and finds that his mother has disappeared. All that remains of her, a pink scarf, his Christmas present to her, is now adorning the snowman that has suddenly appeared in their garden. Harry believes that there might be a link between Jonas’s mother and a strange letter that he’s received, and he soon stumbles across a pattern: over the past decade, eleven women have vanished, all on the day of the first snow.

This is a gripping, suspenseful read and one of Nesbo’s most chilling as he flips what should be a symbol of childhood innocence and purity—a snowman—on its head and turns it into something macabre and disturbing.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue