Forty Days Without Shadow

by Olivier Truc

Paperback

Tomorrow, the sun will rise for the first time in forty days. Half an hour of daylight will herald the end of the polar night in Kautokeino, an isolated village in the snowy Norwegian tundra, home to the indigenous Sami people. 

When a priceless artifact is stolen from the local museum in the last hours of total darkness, detectives Klemet Nango, an experienced Sami officer, and Nina Nansen, a southerner fresh out of the police academy, are called to investigate. Just a few hours later, a local man, one of the last Sami reindeer herders, is found brutally murdered in his hut. 

Klemet and Nina immediately suspect that the two crimes are connected. But in a town fraught with tension - between the indigenous Samis fighting to keep their culture alive, the ultra-Lutheran Scandinavian colonists focused on propagating their own religion, and the greedy geologists eager to mine the region's ore deposits - there are myriad possible motives, and few clues...