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.

Bernadette Calonego's profile page

Gerald Chapple is an award-winning translator of German literature. He received his doctorate at Harvard University and taught German and comparative literature at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He has been translating contemporary German-language fiction, poetry, and nonfiction for more than forty years. Among his seven translations for AmazonCrossing are four novels of suspense by the Swiss-Canadian author and journalist Bernadette Calonego: The Zurich Conspiracy, Under Dark Waters, Stormy Cove, and The Stranger on the Ice. He lives in Dundas, Ontario, with his wife, Nina, and can often be found studying birds, butterflies, and dragonflies; reading; listening to classical music; or enjoying his children and grandchildren in New York.

Gerald Chapple's profile page