The Stranger on the Ice

How deep is she willing to go to find the secrets of her past?

Tour guide Valerie Blaine has always been haunted by the tragic death of her mother during an Arctic expedition thirty years before—unsolved, hushed up, and for Valerie, an unsettled part of a past she’s never been able to escape. Its grip on Valerie is tighter than ever, now that she’s been hired to lead a tourist group across the same desolate terrain where her mother died.

But when a woman’s frozen corpse is found outside a quiet Inuit village just as they’re about to depart, and a friend of Valerie’s mysteriously disappears, Valerie’s suspicions grow; her disquiet is only eased by Clem Hardeven. A man of adventure and roughneck charisma, he’s drawn to Valerie—but he knows nothing of the mysteries that consume her.

As their search takes them into the icy reaches of the Arctic north, Valerie starts to fear that it’s all tied to the darkness that befell her own family long ago—a dangerous puzzle whose pieces have remained elusive to her. Until now.

Bernadette Calonego was born in Switzerland and grew up on the shores of Lake Lucerne. She was just eleven years old when she published her first story in a Swiss newspaper. She went on to earn a teaching degree from the University of Fribourg, which she put to good use in England and Switzerland before switching gears to become a journalist. As a foreign correspondent, she published stories in Vogue, GEO, and SZ Magazin. After several years working with the Reuters news agency and a series of German-language newspapers, she moved to Canada and began writing fiction. The Stranger on the Ice is her fourth novel to be translated into English, following Stormy Cove, Under Dark Waters, and The Zurich Conspiracy. She lives near Vancouver, British Columbia.