Following Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, Italy has been reached by an extraordinary wave of Nordic crime fiction. Numerous Italian publishing houses have subsequently begun translating and publishing crime fiction written by Nordic authors and large numbers of copies have been sold. Why is the Italian reading public so attracted to Nordic crime literature? A possible answer may be found in the exoticism of the Nordic culture, quite foreign to the Italian reader if one sets aside the most common stereotypes. For most Italian readers the real characteristics of Scandinavian society and culture are obscure, nonetheless it can be interesting to observe how the social criticism – since a fundamental characteristic of contemporary Nordic crime fiction is to raise social issues and to discuss them in literary form – and the ‘Nordic exoticism’ work together to create a successful literary product.