An Unsettling Crime at the Top of the World

In the isolated Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, some 800 miles from the North Pole, the tiny town of Longyearben is the kind of place where people go to start their lives over. With brightly colored homes laid out neatly against a mountainous backdrop, it seems out of a fairytale. There’s almost no crime, so residents leave their front doors unlocked and their keys in the car. In the surrounding Arctic wilderness are abundant polar bears, arctic foxes, and reindeer. But when an eerie crime happened in the frozen winter darkness, it brought home a harsh reality: in the modern world, trouble always finds you.