4.5★s
Cold Fear is the second book in the Greenland series by Danish author, Mads Peder Nordbo. It follows on directly from The Girl Without Skin and readers new to the series should note that the recap does contain numerous spoilers for that book.

In 1990, US Marine Sergeant Tom Cave, together with four others, was taking part in a radical medical experiment at Thule, in remote northern Greenland. The drug was meant to enhance the body’s tolerance of cold. The side effects, however, included increased levels of aggression, leading to an incident in which Cave shot and killed two participants before then killing himself. Or did he?

Journalist Matthew Cave has not seen nor heard from his father in twenty-four years, but recently became aware that, from 1990, Tom Cave had lived in Nuuk for ten years. A visit to the mother of Matthew’s sixteen-year-old step-sister, Arnaq, yields a short, unsigned note from Tom, summoning him to a remote town for the chance to explain. But any intention to do so is derailed when Arnaq goes missing from a camping trip with friends at Faeringehavn, the site of a recent ordeal for Matthew and his new-found friend, Tupaarnaq.

The search for Arnaq leads to encounters from some strangely-behaved Faroese along with a now-fugitive former politician and a Greenlandic Government official with ties to the US military, all of whom seem very interested in locating Matthew’s father. Before long, it all gets very blood-thirsty and the body count rises, and even if the reader is suspicious about certain characters, the twists and red herrings will keep most guessing until the final, dramatic climax.

Nordbo manages to wind into his story the politics of the independence campaign for this strategic island, religious cultism and military cover-ups, with the remoteness and isolation of these locations facilitating the credibility of some of the more bizarre incidents.

The setting does present the non-Scandi-speaking reader with a pronunciation challenge, as tongue-twister place names like Ittoqqortoormiit and Qeqertarsuatsiaat appear regularly in the story. Nordbo leaves plenty of scope for further books in the series because, while there’s no cliff-hanger ending, by no means are all the loose ends neatly tied. Once again flawlessly translated from the original Danish by Charlotte Barslund, this is excellent Scandi noir.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Text Publishing