A review by books_are_nice_and_enjoyable
Death In A Cold Climate by Robert Barnard

3.5

Spoilers below.

I've seen this book being described as 'Barnard's best', an assessment with which I certainly do not agree. It's a good book and it feels well-researched - you get the clear impression the author is not writing about Norwegians the way Agatha Christie would write about, say, Belgians... It's a more 'classical' murder mystery than some of his other books,

but in the end it actually turns out to be a very simple and classical case of a blackmailer getting too greedy for his own good, and in the end - an end which arrived somewhat sooner than said blackmailer had expected - getting punished for said greed. I found the ending nowhere near as good as the ending of his first book, which felt both darker and much more surprising. In the specific context I'm not sure I'd even consider the final suicide surprising, rather than really just being one of the most probable outcomes to have been contemplated by the author.