This is a gripping, claustrophobic and complex thriller from John Kare Raake, a Norwegian screenwriter, set in the Arctic featuring PTSD suffering soldier, the traumatised Anna Aune, trained to survive in extreme conditions and a woman who has been involved in a number of conflict ridden parts of the world, is accompanying 73 year old Professor Daniel Zakariassen on a scientific expedition. She had not wanted to do this but urged on by her father, with whom she had been recuperating after serious injuries and a coma, acquired in a nightmare scenario that saw her losing the love of her life, the French medic Yann Renault, working for MSF, who died after being abducted in Syria. From their hovercraft, the Sabvabaa, Anna sees a distress flare, with the dark, the adverse weather conditions, a terrible storm and limited visibility, it is not possible for any of the rescue services to respond, so Anna and Daniel make the decision to go themselves.
They head towards the The Ice Dragon, the Chinese research station, the position the flare appeared to come from. There they stumble on a nightmare scenario from hell, coming across frozen, stabbed and shot dead bodies, there is a ruthless and extremely dangerous killer around. A shocked Anna sets out to protect Daniel, whilst trying to figure out who is dead and what happened, attempting to avoid the same fate as the victims of the massacre. Coming across a badly injured man who refers to himself as Jackie and engineer Marco, Anna wants information and details of those working at the research station whilst trying to figure out if one or both of them is a killer. What exactly is the purpose of the Arctic research station, what were the Chinese looking into and was it this that got almost all of them killed? Anna and Daniel face the gravest of dangers as they strive to survive until rescue teams arrive.
The author does an incredible job of evoking the Arctic, a location where so many nations are racing to identify and access its potentially enormous resources. The storytelling just drips with atmosphere, there are rich descriptions, such as the numerous varieties of ice, all of them deadly, not to mention predators, such as the polar bears and the killer. The central character of Anna, a woman whose traumatised mind continually takes her back to her past and conversing with the dead Yann, is a woman with nothing left to lose, and there is nothing she will not do to find a mass killer. This is a dark, compulsive and unsettling thriller with an underlying sense of menace that builds and builds, with a unforgettable heroine at its centre who stumbles on secrets that lurk under the ice. A great read. Many thanks to Pushkin Press for an ARC.