One winter evening the neighbour's six-year-old boy falls to his death from the apartment roof in Copenhagen. Accidental death, say the police. But Smilla Jaspersen, a resourceful, tenacious and bloody-minded Greenlander, knows the boy well; moreover she has a feeling for snow - and those last footprints tell her a tale... Her investigation starts in Denmark and leads to the Arctic ice cap as Smilla doggedly homes in on her quarry.