TITLE: SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW
AUTHOR: PETER HOEG, TRANSLATED BY TIINA NUNNALLY
PUBLISHER: FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX; 453 PAGES; $21
TITLE: A SIMPLE PLAN
AUTHOR: SCOTT SMITH
PUBLISHER: KNOPF; 335 PAGES; $21
THE BOTTOM LINE: Two ballyhooed books are classic examples of how to -- and how not to -- write a great thriller.
"It's freezing -- an extraordinary 0 degrees Fahrenheit -- and it's snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine, the snow is qanik -- big, almost weightless crystals falling in clumps and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost. December darkness rises up from the grave. . ."
So begins a remarkable, brooding detective thriller by Peter Hoeg, a Danish writer whose work is new to the U.S. The story's grim background is Denmark's exploitation of Greenland, the bleak northern island given its bosky name by Erik the Red, an early real estate promoter who hoped to attract settlers. Most recently, Danes have mined and exhausted Greenland's vast reserves of cryolite, a mineral used in the refining of aluminum, while giving only perfunctory and highly patronizing attention to the culture of the native Inuit.
That's the antiestablishment view of Hoeg's heroine, Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen, a woman caught between the native Greenland culture of her mother, a hunter and tracker, and the comfortable wealth of her Danish father, a physician and scientist. Smilla knows both science and snow, but she is too rebellious to work regularly for the ruling Danes. She is at loose ends in Copenhagen when a six-year-old Eskimo boy she has befriended slips from the snowy roof of their apartment house and is killed. An accident, of course; but the boy, Smilla knows, wouldn't normally have been running on the roof, as his tracks show. And wouldn't have slipped on snow.
Who killed a harmless boy? Come to think of it, where does his alcoholic mother get her money? Smilla begins to poke into a mystery that no one else acknowledges. Answers disappear in the gray, corporate fog that surrounds a great mining conglomerate. The police warn her roughly to stop annoying important citizens. She is befriended -- Why? Simply because she's good- looking? -- by a hulking, silent man, a mechanic, who seems to have had a violent past.
So the storyteller's ancient, changeless pattern develops, working as well in Denmark and Greenland as it did for Ross Macdonald in his Lew Archer novels of darkest California and for Martin Cruz Smith and the series that began with Gorky Park in Moscow. Smilla puts her nose in harm's way and gets it bloodied. Like Archer and like Smith's Russian cop Arkady Renko, she keeps on poking. She's in peril in a glossy casino near Copenhagen, on a powerful, mysteriously equipped icebreaker plowing north toward Greenland, on the floating metal atoll of a huge fueling dock, and finally on the Greenland snow.