Girl in Ice
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4.1 • 107 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
New York Times Editors’ Choice * Los Angeles Times Best Crime Novels of Winter 2022 * Reader’s 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 “Val” 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 Greenland’s barren coast. But Andy is gone: a victim of suicide, having willfully ventured unprotected into 50 degree below zero weather. Val is inconsolable—and disbelieving. She suspects foul play.
When Wyatt, Andy’s fellow researcher in the Arctic, discovers a scientific impossibility—a young girl frozen in the ice who thaws out alive, speaking a language no one understands—Val 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 girl’s speech, Val musters every ounce of her courage and journeys to the Artic to solve the mystery of her brother’s 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 Val’s 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 Wyatt’s research. Can his data be trusted? And does it have anything to do with how and why Val’s brother died? With time running out, Val embarks on an incredible frozen odyssey—led by the unlikeliest of guides—to rescue the new family she has found in the most unexpected of places.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Linguist Val Chesterfield, the narrator of this exemplary thriller from Ferencik (Into the Jungle), grapples with two mysteries—the apparent suicide of her twin brother, Andy, while on a research expedition in northern Greenland that included the discovery of an eight- or nine-year-old girl who was miraculously revived after being found frozen in a glacier. Despite her fears of travel, Val accepts an invitation from expedition leader Wyatt Speeks to travel to the Arctic to see whether she can decipher the child's language, unknown even to the region's indigenous people. Wyatt and his team are hoping the ice cores they're studying can offer answers that could avert a climate disaster at a time when sudden, freezing storms are occurring with increasing frequency worldwide. Val's moving struggles to communicate with the girl alternate with her investigation into Andy's death, which she suspects was a homicide. Trenchant details about catastrophic climate change bolster a creative plot featuring authentic characters, particularly the anxious, flawed Val. Ferencik outdoes Michael Crichton in the convincing way she mixes emotion and science.
Customer Reviews
Girl in the ice
Wonderful book give you a four-star rating would have given a five star rating hate you left out the left-wing rhetoric of global warming. I’m quite familiar with global warming and we’ll see no more about it James Roy Appleton Junior MDJR Appleton and Junior @Gmail
Transformative
Uses Iceland as a vehicle to demonstrate extreme cross cultural and cross generational communication. Very effective vivid and suspenseful writing.
Riveting!
There is much intrigue and suspense! It is definitely well crafted and a page turner.