The Boy in the Snow is the second book in a series featuring Edie Kiglatuk, an Arctic guide. This time she has come south to Alaska to provide backup to a competitor in the Iditarod dog sled race, but her plans are interrupted when she stumbles across a dead child. In the course of her investigation she comes across corrupt local politicians and the Old Believers, a fundamentalist sect who broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church many years ago, and has to find a way through various suspicion and prejudice.

I love stories about private investigators, and although Edie isn't actually a PI or officially employed as an investigator, she fits well into this part of the genre. She is a bit spiky, brave to the point of being foolhardy, fiercely independent, and committed to finding out the truth however inconvenient that might be. She also comes with a lot of personal history and has had alcohol problems in the past. None of this is particularly unusual in the genre. I really enjoyed reading about her in this book though.

I was intrigued by the author's efforts to imagine how Alaska would look to someone from an even colder, wilder, more northern place, somewhere which hasn't been absorbed as another of the United States - although Edie's Arctic home is officially part of Canada, it really is another place and culture.

White Heat, the first book in the series, didn't quite live up to my expectations, but I thought this book was much better.