In this haunting and suspenseful thriller, Robert Masello delivers an adventure that spans continents and centuries--a spellbinding story that ranges from Victorian England to a remote antarctic research station, where an ancient glacier yields a shocking prize it has held captive for nearly two hundred years....

Journalist Michael Wilde--his world recently shattered by tragedy--hopes that a monthlong assignment to the South Pole will give him a new lease on life. Here, in the most inhospitable place on earth, he is simply looking to find solace . . . until, on a routine dive in to the polar sea, he unexpectedly finds something else entirely: a young man and woman, bound with chains and sealed forever in a block of ice. Beside them a chest filled with a strange, and sinister, cargo.

Now, in a bleak but breathtaking world of shimmering icebergs, deep blue crevasses, and never-ending sun, Wilde must unravel the mystery of this doomed couple. Were they the innocent victims of fear and superstition--or were they something far darker? His search will lead from the barracks and battlefields of the Crimean War to the unexplored depths of the Antarctic Ocean, from the ill-fated charge of the Light Brigade to an age-old curse that survives to this day.

As the ice around the murdered lovers begins to melt, Wilde will have to grapple with a miracle--or a nightmare--in the making. For what is dead, it turns out, may not be gone. And here, at the very end of the known world, there's nowhere to hide and no place left for the living to run.

"In the prologue to this exceptional supernatural thriller from Masello (Bestiary), two lovers — Lt. Sinclair Copley of the 17th Lancers and Eleanor Ames, a nurse from Florence Nightingale's Harley Street hospital in London — fall into ice-strewn seas from a British sloop foundering near Antarctica in 1856. In the present, Seattle writer Michael Wilde, who's recovering from a personal tragedy, can't resist the opportunity to go to Antarctica to write a magazine article about the Point Adlie research station. Past and present stories alternate until Michael makes an amazing discovery in a submerged block of ice off the Antarctic coast — two frozen bodies, bound in chains. After Sinclair and Eleanor revive, Masello slowly and subtly reveals how they came to transcend death. The thrills and, most decidedly, the chills mount to a believable, sad and hopeful ending. Fans of John Campbell's 'Who Goes There?' — the basis for the movie The Thing — will find much to like. (Feb.)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

From the battlefields of the Crimean War to the depths of present-day Antarctica, this gripping novel spans centuries to tell a tale that is at once an edge-of-the-seat vampire thriller and sweeping love story.