The Ice Princess

The Ice Princess is a crime novel by the Swedish writer Camilla Lackberg, published in English in 2008. It is her first novel and the first in a series about the detective Patrik Hedstrom and the writer Erica Falck.

Erica has come back to Fjallbacka to deal with her parents' estate and is trying to work on a biography of Selma Lagerlof at the same time. Alex, the friend she grew up with, is found dead in a bath, and the arrangement of the scene points towards suicide, though the details do not fit: the state of the body suggests she died before she was placed in the water, and the timing of the failure of the house's heating is a coincidence worth looking at.

Alex's parents ask Erica to write something about their daughter, and the piece turns into an investigation of her own. Patrik Hedstrom is assigned the case officially, and the two of them end up working on it from different directions: she from what she remembers of the town and its families, and he from the evidence, in a small community where everyone knows everyone else's history.