I found this book from 1993 by the Danish writer Peter Hoeg to be pretty rough going. It started off really engaging and that carried on for about 100 pages, and then after about 150 more I was slogging through the novel, and ended up speed skimming through the rest.
The novel is narrated by Smilla, a Greenland Inuit with a Danish father living in Copenhagen. She returns home one evening to learn that a neighbor boy, a fellow Inuit whom she has befriended, has died by falling from the roof. The police have chalked it up to an accidental death, but in surveying the snow, Smilla believes that his single footprints suggest that he was chased to the roof by a pursuer and that his death was not accidental. She is an expert in snow and snowprints from a kind native intelligence from her mother, but also a decades of technical experience in science and weather through multiple scientific expeditions. She begins investigating the murder and chases down leads.
The novel goes from there, and while I do like her character (although I don’t entirely trust Hoeg as a writer creating an indigenous female character) the novel takes forever to move forward. It can’t tell exactly if it wants to be literary, be a suspense novel, or be a literary suspense novel, this decision leads to a novel that I feel is about 150 pages too long and slowly slowly grinds to the conclusion, which is perfectly good too, but takes so long to get there.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Smillas-Sense-Snow-Peter-Hoeg/dp/0385315147/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3OHLVCW437Y2I&keywords=smilla%27s+sense+of+snow&qid=1578335456&sprefix=smilla%27s%2Caps%2C444&sr=8-1)