Blood and Ice

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Journalist Michael Wilde—his world recently shattered by tragedy—has come to the South Pole looking for solace and a new lease on life. But what he finds on a routine dive in the polar sea is something else entirely: the bodies of a young man and a young woman, bound with chains and sealed forever in a block of ice. Beside them is an ancient chest filled with a sinister cargo. Wilde’s search to unravel the mystery of this doomed couple will lead from the battlefields of the Crimean War to the unexplored depths of the Antarctic Ocean, where an age-old curse survives to this day. And as the ice around the lovers begins to melt, Wilde will witness what may be a miracle—or a nightmare—in the making. What is dead, it turns out, is not always gone. From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. 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 Adélie 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.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Starred Review On assignment at a South Pole scientific research station, travel writer Michael Wilde makes a staggering discovery: a man and a woman, bound together by chains, perfectly preserved in the ice. Although the novel doesn’t star Carter Cox, who was featured in Masello’s Bestiary (2006) and Vigil (2005), it does have much in common with those supernatural thrillers, especially the mixture of past and present. The author tells two stories at the same time: the story of Michael, plunging back into work to make himself stop grieving over a recent personal tragedy; and the story of Sinclair and Eleanor, soldier and nurse, respectively, who meet in the mid-1850s and are, for reasons that remain a mystery for much of the book, eventually chained together and tossed into the frigid Antarctic waters. The novel has all the trappings of a supernatural thriller—a dark secret, a mysterious substance in a bottle, a dead man who won’t stay dead—but in its heart it’s a love story, a tale of devotion and sacrifice and survival against astronomical odds. Stylishly written, with a well-crafted story and a cast of vividly realized characters, the novel could propel the author out of his horror niche and into the mainstream. --David Pitt