Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is one of the low-power wide-area network technologies that aim to support enormous connection, deep coverage, low power consumption, and low cost. Therefore, low cost of implementation and maintenance is one of the key challenges of NB-IoT terminals. This paper presents a low-complexity formulation for narrowband secondary synchronization signal (NSSS) detection in the NB-IoT system, supported by a coherent algorithm that requires a priori knowledge of the channel. By exploiting a symmetric conjugate feature of the NSSS sequence, a joint physical cell ID and radio frame number detection method with low complexity is proposed for coherent detection. The probability of erroneous detection of the presented NSSS detection method is computed, and the analytical model is verified by means of simulation. Numerical experiments will demonstrate that the proposed detection scheme remarkably reduces the computational complexity with almost the same detection ability compared to the existing detection scheme.