8 Frigid Thrillers Set During Snowstorms

The eighth installment of Gerritsen’s justly acclaimed Rizzoli and Isles series takes place in wintry Wyoming. 

Chief Medical Examiner Maura Isles has travelled to the Cowboy State to attend a medical conference. Hooking up with old friends she heads to the mountains for a short skiing trip. A snowstorm catches the party unawares and soon they are holed up in the crumbling cabins of a ghost town.

 It’s a perilous situation made gets worse thanks to an evil presence lurking in the blizzard. When she receives word that Isles is missing, Jane Rizzoli flies to Wyoming to investigate, fearful that it may be too late to save her best friend.

The Scottish Highland village of Glenfarach may look idyllic, but it’s actually a heavily monitored halfway house for 200 hardened criminals recently released from Scotland’s maximum security prisons. Police officers Victoria Montgomery-Porter and Edward Reekie are tasked with escorting aged gangster Mark Bishop to the site. 

But the weather in the Cairngorms soon intervenes trapping the cops in a place where all types of evil men want them dead. Filled with McBride’s trademark dark and grisly humour, the ensuing mayhem is both brutal and wildly entertaining.

A party of ex-Oxford University pals travel to an isolated lodge in the Scottish Highlands at New Year for what they imagine will be the fun and frolics of a Golden Age-style ‘murder hunt’. 

However, the previously happy dynamic of the tight knit group is unsettled by the presence of assorted new partners and soon old grievances and new animosities begin to surface. 

The Hunting Party simmers with menace from the outset and things take a darker turn when a blizzard descends. Cut off from the world and with a killer lurking in their midst, the posh group’s merry murder hunt turns into a deadly battle for survival.

The best-selling author of The Woman in Cabin 10 is on peak page-turning form in this snowbound, Agatha Christie-like thriller set in a remote French Chalet. 

The irksomely hipster employees of a new music app, Snoop, have assembled for some team-bonding high in the Alps. It’s not long before they are cut off from the outside world by a swirling snowstorm. In the claustrophobic confines of the log cabin, inter-office back-stabbing looks to have taken a literal turn when one of the crew disappears. 

Is it an accident, or is it murder? A brilliantly plotted and sharply observed icy treat.

Anyone who reads crime fiction would be wary of going to stay in a former sanatorium in the Swiss mountains even if it has been converted into a deluxe hotel. 

Pearse’s doughty detective, Elin Warner, has similar misgivings, but she’s at a low point in her life and her brother, Isaac and his fiancée, Laure are celebrating their engagement at the hotel. Putting her fears aside, she travels to the mountains in the hope of some much needed rest and recreation. 

Once she’s settled in her room, however, the feelings of foreboding return. Soon snow is whirling around the building and Laure disappears. As her fellow guests begin to panic, Elin must keep calm and find the missing woman.

Hoeg’s 1992 international best-selling mystery novel, begins when a young Inuit boy, falls to his death from the snowy roof of a grim apartment building in Copenhagen. 

One of the residents, Greenlander, Smilla Jasperson starts to investigate the boy’s death aided by a local mechanic, Peter. The trail takes the intelligent and resourceful sleuth by ship back to her native Greenland, where, on an isolated island, a shadowy international corporation is clearly up to no good amongst the pack ice. 

The winner of the CWA Silver Dagger in 1994, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow kicked off the often chilly crime genre we now know as Scandi-Noir.

Ritzy chalets, posh hunting lodges, luxury trains, and upmarket hotels are the sort of places people get trapped by the snow in your typical crime thriller. Student Darby Thorne isn’t so lucky. 

When a storm hits in Colorado, she’s forced to take shelter at a rest stop with four strangers — the only source of sustenance a couple of vending machines. 

Things get even less comfortable when Darby discovers that one of the strangers has a kidnapped child in the back of their van. But which one is it, and how will she save the kid?

Crime fiction suggests that Scotland in the snow is one of the deadliest places on the planet. 

That’s even truer when you are trapped in a laboratory housing one of the world’s deadliest viruses with a group of hardened criminals and a cluster of family members for whom personal gain tops international bio-security. 

As the blizzard wipes out all communication, it’s down to ex-cop Toni Gallo, female head of the laboratory security team, to keep the planet safe. Set during a 24-hour period, Follett’s thriller is as tense as piano strings and as sharp as an icicle.