The Thawing Silence

About this book

Glaciologist Maren Eide swore never to go back to Svalbard, where the ice took her brother seven years ago. Then the retreating glacier gives something of his back. When she lands in the polar night, the scientist who sent for her is missing. A Nordic-noir thriller.

In the northernmost town on Earth, the sun has set for four months — and somewhere in the dark, a careful killer is counting on no one looking.

Glaciologist Maren Eide swore she would never go back to Svalbard. Seven years ago she led the survey that killed her younger brother, watched the ice swallow him whole, and blamed her own hand on the route. Then an email pulls her north on the last flight before the weather closes the island: the retreating glacier has given something of Jonas’s back, and the scientist who sent for her needs her to come.

By the time Maren lands into the polar night, that scientist is missing. Within two days she is dead — an accident, the town agrees, far too quickly. A storm seals the island. The flights stop, the radio fails, the road to the remote research station vanishes under the snow, and Maren is trapped in the dark with a dozen strangers and the certainty that one of them is a murderer.

She has until the sun returns to prove it. Because the same hand that staged this death staged her brother’s — to bury a lie about the failing ground beneath the town’s own houses. And as a midwinter thaw begins to loosen everything the cold has kept, Maren learns the killer is willing to let the whole settlement fall into the ice rather than be found out.

In a place where it is illegal to die because the frozen ground will not let the dead rot, the truth has been preserved like everything else — perfect, patient, and waiting for the thaw to force it loose.

A propulsive, atmospheric Nordic-noir locked-room thriller for readers of Ragnar Jonasson, Michael Robotham, and Riley Sager. Start reading and don’t look away.