GIRL IN ICE

From the author of The River at Night and Into the Jungle comes a harrowing new thriller as a linguist, broken-hearted after the apparent suicide of her glaciologist brother, ventures hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle to try to communicate with a young girl who has thawed from the ice alive.

Valerie "Val" Chesterfield is a linguist and professor trained in the most esoteric of disciplines: dead Nordic languages. Despite her successful career, Val leads a sheltered life and languishes in the shadow of her even more accomplished twin brother, Andy, a climate science researcher stationed on a remote island off Greenland's barren coast.

One night, Andy ventures out, nearly naked, in 50 degree below zero weather and dies by apparent suicide. Val is both 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. Would she travel to the frozen North and meet this girl, 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, everything is as Val feared: the landscape is fierce, and Wyatt is an enigma. But the girl is special, and soon she becomes like the daughter Val never had.

Only something is terribly wrong; the girl is sick, and the key to saving her lies in discovering the truth about Wyatt's research (and her brother's involvement and subsequent death). With time running out, Val embarks on an incredible frozen odyssey - led by an unlikely guide - to rescue the new family she has found in the most unexpected of places.

Erica Ferencik is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Boston University. Her work has appeared in Salon and The Boston Globe, as well as on National Public Radio.