Wintry novels

A perfect book for winter reading. The ice-sleigh speeding across the infinitely cold and completely frozen Lake of the Coheeries will carry you off into this magical realism adventure with timelines in two different centuries.

It’s impossible not to be transported with the phrase “winter is coming.”

And winter in Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series is about as wintry as it gets, meteorologically and metaphorically.

The first book in this iconic series will have you riveted to the pages, but it’s not for the faint of heart.

One of the most cinematic books, surrounded by this feeling of enveloping snow on an island in Puget Sound.

David Guterson created a tense legal thriller wrapped in tragic history, and all these years later, it’s still the cold standard.

On the day of the year’s first snow, a snowman inexplicably appears in someone’s yard. Then someone in the house disappears. Only her pink scarf remains, and the snowman is now wearing it.

Inspector Harry Hole discovers it’s not the first time this has happened.

If you find a snowman in your yard, you better hope the kids built him.

A World War II-era family learns to farm in the beautiful and unpredictable Rocky Mountains — where Millie Reynolds has buried a dark secret.

As the winter snows set in and choices weigh heavy, every path leads to pain. But Millie will do anything to protect the ones she loves and learns to rely on the mountains to show her the way.

Fascinatingly constructed and so chillingly compelling. This Nordic noir groundbreaker is the story of a young boy who supposedly fell to his death in the Copenhagen snow.

A Greenlander named Smilla tracks down the killer, and as the description says, “an explosive secret takes her back to the world of ice and snow from which she comes.”

How many of us have hidden in a closet and wondered if we found the right one, we could travel to Narnia, even though it’s infinitely dangerous?

We all wanted to go with Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy to that frozen land ruled by the tyrannical White Witch.

This is the second in the classic Chronicles of Narnia series, but read this one first.

There seems to be a fantasy theme on this list, and maybe that is one of the mysterious properties of snow.

When intrepid Lyra must travel far, far north in order to stop the … well, you know. There are witch clans and armored bears. And those are the good guys!

This book — like all books in the His Dark Materials series — is thrilling, inspirational, thought-provoking and timeless. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s only for a YA audience.

This take on an Agatha Christie novel is so much fun to read. We all know the “group of people trapped in a mountain chalet in a snowstorm” routine, and yet, this one has twists and an undercurrent of rich techie millionaires.

And as they say, tensions simmer. There’s an avalanche, and the electricity goes out, and there’s nothing to eat, and … the one thing you don’t want to do is go outside.

This is the “everyone trapped on a train in the snow” Agatha Christie classic and still one of the best books like this ever written. It’s enhanced by a few very unpredictable puzzle pieces, and not just the ending.