Westport Public Library BOOK blog

On Sunday, February 17th, at 2 p.m. the Usual Suspects Mystery Reading group will discuss Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg, which has been called a stunning intellectual thriller in the tradition of Gorky Park and the novels of John Le Carré.

Smilla Jaspersen is the daughter of a Danish doctor and an Inuit woman from Greenland who lives in Copenhagen. When an Inuit boy she knows dies under mysterious circumstances, she refuses to believe it was an accident. She decides to investigate and discovers that even the police don't want her involved.

Smilla persists, and her investigation leads her from a fanatically religious accountant to a tough-talking pathologist and then to the secret files of the Danish company responsible for extracting most of Greenland's mineral wealth. Finally, she boards a ship with an international cast of villains laden with a large stash of cocaine bound for a mysterious mission on an inhospitable island off Greenland.

After a ten year absence from the literary scene, Hoeg has recently published a new book that, like Smilla’s Sense of Snow, is indeed a psychological thriller, something of a detective story, but, most of all, an intense character study.

Set in modern-day Denmark, The Quiet Girl centers around Kaspar Krone, a world-renowned circus clown with an unusual ability. Krone can access “acoustic essences” – auras of sound revealing the personalities of people in musical key signatures.

Sounds strange? It gets even stranger. Wanted for tax evasion and on the verge of extradition, Krone is drafted into the service of a mysterious order of nuns who promise him they can secure a reprieve from the international authorities if he will help safeguard a group of children who also have this mystical ability.

When one of the children goes missing, Krone sets off to find the young girl. He makes a shocking series of discoveries along the way about her identity and the true intentions of his young charges.

The book has met with mixed reviews, but Publishers Weekly promises that it will appeal to Hoeg’s “many fans and other readers with a taste for the literary offbeat.”