Suspense

On the Norwegian fjord, aboard the elegant yacht Hermione, Brenda Gilholme lives amid beauty, social polish, and quiet emotional strain. Intelligent, overeducated, and painfully self-aware, she feels the weight of being overshadowed by her brilliant sister Alice, now married to Captain Huston, and the casual cruelty of society has left her disillusioned yet still secretly hopeful for a man unlike the rest. That hope takes shape in Theo Trist, a reserved but unmistakably compelling figure whose friendship with Brenda carries an unspoken depth. The quiet on deck is sharpened by the looming wilderness around them, where Arctic twilight, isolation, and memory create an atmosphere of foreboding. When a small boat comes up the fjord, Trist arrives as a man of contradictions: rough-clad yet gentlemanly, gentle in manner yet forged by war. Once destined for the Church, he found his true calling as a brilliant war correspondent, chronicling the great Continental conflict with rare fairness, insight, and soldierly courage. But the yacht's civilized calm is shattered when Admiral Wylie disappears upriver. Trist takes command, and Brenda, with Mrs. Wylie, joins the search through rain, darkness, and a remote glacial valley. There, amid the cold silence of the wilderness, Brenda learns that Wylie is dead and that the crisis has only just begun. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.