It’s always a pleasure to encounter a really unusual setting for crime fiction, but novelty alone is no good — it needs a decent story to go with it. Luckily, Forty Days Without Shadow by Olivier Truc (Trapdoor, £12.99) scores both ways.

It’s set in a Norwegian Lapland winter, at the end of the Polar Night, when there are only a few minutes of sunlight each day and where a sudden rise in temperature to -17°C strikes the locals as “almost springlike.”

Here the Reindeer Police patrol vast distances on their snowmobiles, settling disputes between the Sami reindeer breeders who make their hard living out on the tundra as they have done for millennia.