COLD BURN

Fresh from their debut in Leave No Trace (2024), National Park Service investigator Michael Walker and FBI agent Gina Delgado team up again, sort of, to solve an oversized mystery that threatens all life on Earth.

The case begins as several cases. A U.S. Geological Survey team gone missing in an avalanche disappears from the cave where they’ve taken refuge. A submarine on a training mission, accidentally struck by a long-dormant explosive device a salvage ship is pulling up, sinks to the bottom of Alaska’s Icy Strait, where its entire crew perishes. Walker, looking into a rash of stolen Tlingit artifacts, watches his leading suspects get shot to death by an assassin he must kill in turn, destroying his best lead. Delgado is assigned to identify a man who’s been seriously worked over by local fauna before his body is recovered from the Everglades. It takes a long time to work out the connection among all of these misfortunes, and even when the two authors writing as Landau reveal that both the USGS team and the submarine crew have frozen to death in relatively temperate settings, along with vast quantities of native fish who should be immune to the cold, the answer raises still more questions. How could such a thing happen? Who could have made it happen, and why? And what can be done about it before the rash of freezings goes worldwide? Following separate trails that readers will see converging long before the investigators do, Walker and Delgado eventually band together with the Tlingit community and each other to wrestle with the anticlimactic human scoundrels behind Operation Cold Burn.

The action-packed unraveling may be routine, but not the calamitous threat, which is a high concept worthy of James Bond.