The setting for this story is a hotel high up in the Norwegian mountains. The ‘guests,’ survivors from a nearby train crash, take shelter there and immediately become trapped by the appalling weather outside. Then, as the snow lashes the windows and the temperature starts to plummet, in typical locked-room mystery fashion the bodies start to pile up.

As luck would have it one of the hotel guests and survivor of the aforementioned train derailment is a retired police inspector, Hanne Wilhelmsen, who is paralysed from the waist down as the result of a previous shooting incident; she’s also incredibly grumpy and antisocial, but surprisingly likeable none the less. Anyway, before long our intrepid detective is tasked with solving the mystery of why people are being picked off, and more importantly, of who is doing the killing.

If that all sounds a bit too formulaic for your tastes then don’t worry, because that’s not how it comes across when you read it. Wilhelmson is an intriguing character, with enough depth and personality to make the reader want to stick with her. And the mystery of who or what was in the sealed last carriage of the train when it went off the rails adds another dimension to the story, one that kept me hooked to the end.

This is actually the eighth book in Anne Holt’s series about retired lesbian police inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen, but it’s the first, and so far the only one, to be translated into English. There’s obviously an interesting back-story to Wilhelmson, one that’s only touched on in this novel, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series (which is due to be published in English over the next two years) to catch up on that.

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