New York Times Editorsâ Choice * Los Angeles Times Best Crime Novels of Winter 2022 * Readerâs Digest Best Fiction Books of 2022
From the author of The River at Night and Into the Jungle comes a harrowing new thriller set in the unforgiving landscape of the Arctic Circle, as a brilliant linguist struggling to understand the apparent suicide of her twin brother ventures hundreds of miles north to try to communicate with a young girl who has been thawed from the ice alive.
Valerie âValâ Chesterfield is a linguist trained in the most esoteric of disciplines: dead Nordic languages. Despite her successful career, she leads a sheltered life and languishes in the shadow of her twin brother, Andy, an accomplished climate scientist stationed on a remote island off Greenlandâs barren coast. But Andy is gone: a victim of suicide, having willfully ventured unprotected into 50 degree below zero weather. Val is inconsolableâand disbelieving. She suspects foul play.
When Wyatt, Andyâs fellow researcher in the Arctic, discovers a scientific impossibilityÂâa young girl frozen in the ice who thaws out alive, speaking a language no one understandsâVal is his first call. Will she travel to the frozen North to meet this girl, and try to comprehend what she is so passionately trying to communicate? Under the auspices of helping Wyatt interpret the girlâs speech, Val musters every ounce of her courage and journeys to the Artic to solve the mystery of her brotherâs death.
The moment she steps off the plane, her fear threatens to overwhelm her. The landscape is fierce, and Wyatt, brilliant but difficult, is an enigma. But the girl is special, and Valâs connection with her is profound. Only something is terribly wrong; the child is sick, maybe dying, and the key to saving her lies in discovering the truth about Wyattâs research. Can his data be trusted? And does it have anything to do with how and why Valâs brother died? With time running out, Val embarks on an incredible frozen odysseyâled by the unlikeliest of guidesâto rescue the new family she has found in the most unexpected of places.