On Thin Ice

On Thin Ice is Alina Adams’s 2004 first Figure Skating Mystery, a cozy procedural set inside the ESPN-adjacent television production of a Worlds-level figure skating competition in San Francisco. Bex Levy, a Russian-American researcher for the 24/7 Sports network, is assigned to dig up on-air background on the favorite Silvana Potenza when Silvana turns up dead in a backstage stairwell hours before her short program. Bex starts investigating because the network needs the story, and stays investigating because the murder is more interesting than the network knows.

Adams worked as an actual ABC and ESPN figure-skating researcher before writing the series, and the procedural texture shows on every page: the way scoring panels are seated, the political-tug logistics of national federations, the way producers handle on-ice falls in real time, the actual physics of why a skater might lie about a triple Salchow. The mystery is small-cast and fair-play; the romantic subplot with skater Jordan Toth is well calibrated; the supporting characters (the executive producer, the legendary commentator) feel like real people inside a real broadcast booth.

Recommended for figure-skating fans, for cozy readers who want a setting they have never seen before, and for anyone looking for books like On Thin Ice in the very narrow subgenre of competitive-skating mystery (only Lola Schaefer’s YA Ice Princess shelf comes close). Four stars and the start of a series worth completing.