Swedish thriller ‘Snowdrift’ will give a reader chills

Helene Tursten’s latest Embla Nyström procedural thaws out a cold case.

In Swedish novelist Helene Tursten’s third in the Embla Nyström police procedural series, the discovery of a mobster murdered at a pastoral country inn ignites a complicated plot that quickly includes multiple homicides and a longago missing girl.

Definitively set in subfreezing rural, western Sweden, “Snowdrift” (Soho Press Inc., 384 pp., ★★g☆) returns 28year-old Detective Inspector Embla Nyström to another nuts-and-bolts CSI tale. Except this one proves deeply personal.

Tursten wastes no time pulling on her crime-scene latex gloves. In the first few pages, an investigation starts on the murder of Mafia boss Milo Stavic, found dead in a countryside guesthouse the same night a high-school boy is knifed to death at a nearby party. Meanwhile, the cold-case abduction of Embla’s teenage girlfriend, Lollo, which has haunted our heroine for 14 years, is thawing.

The author of the Irene Huss and the Embla Nyström crime series, Tursten was born and lives in Gothenburg, Sweden, near where this story takes place. So, the settings in this personal-twist police procedural ring true, including descriptions of subfreezing weather, food (moose meatballs, wild boar cutlets), bleak geography and the storytelling’s demeanor. It’s nothing if not Nordic – which is part of its charm.

At her best, Tursten immerses her protagonist Embla in methodical crime scene searches, interrogations of suspects and fast-thinking responses while being assaulted. That’s where readers new to the Nyström novels learn Embla is one tough cop. She’s a sharpshooter and a big-game hunter. She’s a Nordic light welterweight boxing champion. She’s smart, intuitive, likable – and a redheaded Swedish beauty you fall for.

But while Embla is a fetching protagonist, she’s also troubled. Her overly keen sense of smell detects so many odors, from strong “male fragrance” to the “metallic smell of blood,” that eventually, you hold your nose. Oddly, when upset, she’s prone to nausea, serious stomachaches (described as “a burning cannonball in her stomach”) and outright fainting, all of which seem out of character. And she remains traumatized and tormented by nightmares about the unknown fate of her long-gone friend.

Unquestionably, Embla is what’s most compelling in this slow-moving Nordic noir novel. From the start, Tursten writes too much talk, too little action – unless endless forensic speculation, excessive mundane details and obsession with eating count as action. Most of the novel’s criminal acts are flashbacks or backgrounders. Not until three-quarters into the book does the author let loose with 30 gripping pages in an edge-of-your-seat climatic shootout scene so skillfully written you wonder: Why not more, and sooner?

Unfortunately, Tursten’s watchingwater-boil approach extends to the promising romance between Embla and amiable small-town detective Olle Tillman (repeatedly called “the best-looking cop in Dalsland”), who becomes her crime-solving partner.

But Embla and Olle are no Salander and Blomkvist. And while Tursten tells a solid character-driven tale, unlike Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl With…” series (the benchmark for Scandinavian crime novels), her slow-melt plotting takes much of the thrill out of an otherwise convincing crime thriller.