Blood and Ice [Mass Market Paperback]

Robert Masello (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 27, 2010

Journalist Michael Wilde—his world recently shattered by tragedy—has come to the South Pole looking for solace and a new lease on life. But what he finds on a routine dive in the polar sea is something else entirely: the bodies of a young man and a young woman, bound with chains and sealed forever in a block of ice. Beside them is an ancient chest filled with a sinister cargo. Wilde’s search to unravel the mystery of this doomed couple will lead from the battlefields of the Crimean War to the unexplored depths of the Antarctic Ocean, where an age-old curse survives to this day. And as the ice around the lovers begins to melt, Wilde will witness what may be a miracle—or a nightmare—in the making.  What is dead, it turns out, is not always gone.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In the prologue to this exceptional supernatural thriller from Masello (Bestiary), two lovers—Lt. Sinclair Copley of the 17th Lancers and Eleanor Ames, a nurse from Florence Nightingale's Harley Street hospital in London—fall into ice-strewn seas from a British sloop foundering near Antarctica in 1856. In the present, Seattle writer Michael Wilde, who's recovering from a personal tragedy, can't resist the opportunity to go to Antarctica to write a magazine article about the Point Adélie research station. Past and present stories alternate until Michael makes an amazing discovery in a submerged block of ice off the Antarctic coast—two frozen bodies, bound in chains. After Sinclair and Eleanor revive, Masello slowly and subtly reveals how they came to transcend death. The thrills and, most decidedly, the chills mount to a believable, sad and hopeful ending. Fans of John Campbell's Who Goes There?—the basis for the movie The Thing—will find much to like. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* On assignment at a South Pole scientific research station, travel writer Michael Wilde makes a staggering discovery: a man and a woman, bound together by chains, perfectly preserved in the ice. Although the novel doesn’t star Carter Cox, who was featured in Masello’s Bestiary (2006) and Vigil (2005), it does have much in common with those supernatural thrillers, especially the mixture of past and present. The author tells two stories at the same time: the story of Michael, plunging back into work to make himself stop grieving over a recent personal tragedy; and the story of Sinclair and Eleanor, soldier and nurse, respectively, who meet in the mid-1850s and are, for reasons that remain a mystery for much of the book, eventually chained together and tossed into the frigid Antarctic waters. The novel has all the trappings of a supernatural thriller—a dark secret, a mysterious substance in a bottle, a dead man who won’t stay dead—but in its heart it’s a love story, a tale of devotion and sacrifice and survival against astronomical odds. Stylishly written, with a well-crafted story and a cast of vividly realized characters, the novel could propel the author out of his horror niche and into the mainstream. --David Pitt --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 704 pages
• Publisher: Bantam; Reprint edition (July 27, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553591967
• ISBN-13: 978-0553591965
• Product Dimensions: 4.1 x 1.1 x 6.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (150 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #199,201 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #89 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Historical

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sneaks up on you a bit, but also predictable, March 29, 2009

By 

Tung Yin (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Blood and Ice (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

From the bare synopsis, I thought this might be something like "The Da Vinci Code" in the South Pole. I quickly realized that was not the case. It's a little more like the way Clive Cussler uses a historical incident to launch each thriller, except that here, the historical incident is less frenetically paced, and occupies more of the book than the opening teaser.

The historical part of the book is more or less the love story between the dashing Lt. Sinclair Copley and nurse Eleanor Ames during the Crimean War. Oddly, however, the book opens with the two of them being chained up and thrown off a boat to drown in icy waters. It's later chapters that tell the story of how they got together.

The modern part of the story is about a photojournalist's trip to a research station at the South Pole, where he makes an . . . interesting discovery. The atmosphere is not unlike that in John Carpenter's "The Thing," minus of course the gory special effects.

It's really hard to say more without spoiling the plot of the book, so I won't. What I will say is that the plot twists are both predictable yet subtle, if that makes sense. In other words, the careful (or prolific) reader will have figured out what's going on before the reveal, but it's still satisfying all the same.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Moody, Frightening, Gripping & Spellbinding, April 30, 2010

By 

Beth Saboori (Santa Monica, California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Blood and Ice (Hardcover)

It's 1856 and Sinclair Copley and Eleanor Ames are aboard the HM Brig Coventry in the Southern Ocean. Eleanor is ill. The ship has been blown off coarse and the superstitious sailors blame the passengers. When they find out what Eleanor's medicine really is, they wrap the pair in chains and toss them into the cold, cold ocean.

In the present day the love of Michael Wilde's life lies in a coma, the victim of a climbing accident. Michael is awash in depression, which leads him to accepting a job in Antarctica, where while on a dive one day to photograph marine life he comes across two bodies encased in ice. The frozen couple seem almost alive. They're wrapped in chains. How'd they get there? Accident? Murder?

Michael and crew bring the bodies up and wait for them to thaw out, but they disappear and a couple of the crew are murdered. Who did it? This the survivors need to know. Plus, where are the dead from the deep? These questions will grip you as the book moves between time and place, telling us both Sinclair and Eleanor's story and Michael's as well. There is horror afoot in Antarctica, but it didn't originate there.

This is a story peopled with characters easy to identify with. It's moody, frightening, gripping and spellbinding.

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Plodding, Pedestrian, Implausible, March 8, 2009

By 

G. Brookings - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Blood and Ice (Kindle Edition)

It may sound odd to ask a science fiction adventure novel to be believable, but this complaint has less to do with the suspension of disbelief one accords to a mixed vampire/techno genre and more to do with the characters, their depth and ultimately their motives. A few examples...SPOILER ALERT...The station head decides not to alert anyone in authority to the startling discovery, or to the mayhem and loss of personnel in order to avoid tangling with the bureaucracy. They won't notice that people don't come back? Huh? A bereaved widow, meeting what she thinks is her husband's casket is informed by a man she has never met that instead he is smuggling a live person into the country, but that her husband is in fact dead. No problem. Metronomic, paint-by-numbers flashbacks which have little relevance to character development or plot; depthless characters and lumbering, expository prose. You want vampires, science fiction? There are many way better choices.