Anthropologist Dinah Pelerin had no idea when she left sunny Hawaii for Norway that she would get a crash course in the politics of genetic engineering and the Doomsday Seed Vault. Nor did she expect that she would become embroiled in the marital troubles of an American presidential candidate and his enigmatic, Norwegian-born wife...or that a dead body would tumble out of the hotel sauna into her arms.

In late December, Polar Night wraps the little town of Longyearbyen like a lead blanket, impenetrable and endless. The temperature rarely climbs above zero and bodies don't decompose in the permafrost. The dead have to be shipped south for burial and soon there are two murder victims headed south. Who has killed them and why? With three U.S. senators, a powerful corporate CEO, and a Norwegian government minister as her fellow suspects, Dinah is under no illusions about taking the fall. She had better untangle the knot of motives and pretenses fast or suspicion will come crashing downhill like an avalanche and bury her so deep she'll never see daylight again.