Zodiac Station

Starred review from March 30, 2015
Harper (The Orpheus Descent) brilliantly uses a framing device straight out of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in crafting an utterly compelling, sophisticated page-turner set in the Arctic. Capt. Carl Franklin and his crew aboard the U.S. Coast Guard ice-breaker Terra Nova face a baffling mystery when they rescue a man named Thomas Anderson from an ice floe in the middle of nowhere. Anderson, who’s in bad shape from hypothermia and frostbite, tells Franklin that he’s a researcher from Zodiac Station, a scientific base on the island of Utgard. Martin Hagger, a biologist who believes that life on Earth originated at the poles, recruited Anderson, but when Anderson arrived at Zodiac, Hagger was gone. This was but the first of many puzzles Anderson encountered. After the base was devastated by an explosion, Anderson traveled more than 100 miles in just four days in search of help. Franklin, who finds aspects of Anderson’s narrative questionable, probes relentlessly for the truth about what happened at the research outpost on Utgard. The plotting is complex but logical, with a fairly clued and stunning payoff. Agent: Jane Conway-Gordon, Jane Conway-Gordon Ltd. Literary Agent (U.K.).

May 1, 2015
Here's an energetic, imaginative, and labyrinthine thriller by the author of The Orpheus Descent(2014). In the Arctic, the crew of a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker is shocked to discover a lone man on the ice. Thomas Anderson says he is the sole survivor of a scientific research station, but as he recounts his bizarre storyand as the stories of subsequent survivors begin to call Anderson's own tale into questionthe icebreaker crew begins to suspect something very bad happened at Zodiac Station. With nods to some classic horror/SF stories (The Thing, Frankenstein, Alien, among others), the novel is full of twists and turns; it starts out as a murder mystery and winds up an SF thriller, with stops along the way for Cold War intrigue and political conspiracy. Great fun for genre-blend lovers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)