Scene of the crime: Deep-freeze mysteries and how-tos from crime fiction's masters

Two new mysteries from deep-frozen lands may not be your cup of hot chocolate right now, but maybe a few alternatives from more temperate climes will satisfy your crime-fiction urges.

James Thompson's "Snow Angels" (Putnam's, 264 pp., $24.95) has the bracingly clean prose you'd expect from a book set above the Arctic Circle. Inspector Kari Vaara, recovering from being wounded on duty in Helsinki, has returned to his hometown in Lapland. It's near Christmas, it's dark all the time, and the locals, who all seem a little cracked anyway, are close to the edge.

Vaara investigates the gruesome murder of a Somali actress, trying to stave off an avalanche of racial tension and xenophobia in an already tense environment. Meanwhile, Vaara's American wife, pregnant and newly installed as the manager of a resort complex, is doing her best to adapt to Lapland's silent and solitary ways. Thompson, an American who has lived in Finland for years, writes vividly of a place he clearly knows and loves.

Up in Alaska, meanwhile, Anchorage resident and former bush pilot Stan Jones continues his rugged and evocative series about State Trooper Nathan Active with "Village of the Ghost Bears" (Soho, 333 pp., $24). Active is a nicely complex character, trying to reconcile his Inupiat heritage with having been raised by white adoptive parents, a status that makes him neither insider nor outsider in the eyes of many.

With deep empathy for the rough-hewn people who survive life in the far corners of his state, Active grapples with a terrible tragedy — arson at a recreation center that has killed eight people. At the same time, he looks at the bizarre death of a fisherman whose body was found near a remote lake.

That rascal Lovejoy is back in British writer Jonathan Gash's "Faces in the Pool" (St. Martin's, 334 pp., $24.99). Lovejoy, perennially broke and morally dubious, is a walking encyclopedia about antiques — understanding, selling, or forging them, whatever gets him a little cash.

Here he's forced into a crazy scheme of entering into a marriage of convenience so that a rich woman can track down her hated ex. As always in this colorful series, the reader is treated to a raffish story and an astonishing amount of insider knowledge.

One complaint: Lovejoy, always catnip to women, is overly fond of the phrase "making smiles" to describe his amorous high jinks. Surely someone as resourceful as he is could invent a new euphemism or two.

P.D. James, justly praised as one of the genre's great masters, discusses her work — and that of others — in "Talking About Detective Fiction" (Knopf, 208 pp., $22). Now in her 80s, James is a cogent and cheerfully opinionated guide through her particular literary specialty. An equally captivating book of writers talking about their work is "The Lineup" (Little, Brown, 406 pp., $25.99), edited by Otto Penzler. In pieces commissioned by Penzler's famous Mysterious Bookshop, 20-odd authors hold forth on how and why they created their most famous characters.

Some are straightforward essays, like those of Lee Child (Jack Reacher), Faye Kellerman (Decker and Lazarus), and Alexander McCall Smith (Precious Ramotswe). Others are less orthodox: Robert B. Parker has Spenser submitting to an interview in a café, and Jeffery Deaver offers a short story about Lincoln Rhyme. There are few unknowns here, and regrettably few women writers, but "The Lineup" is great fun anyway.