Icy Eden

He called himself Adam. He was sure he could bring humanity back to life. All that was needed was women for the role of Eve. Many women… In the Karelia village of Kaises, there are impassable swamps, frozen lakes, and empty lots blown by all winds. The locals moved out long ago, and the chance of meeting a person there is far smaller than encountering a starving lone bear or wolf. And in those places there is a shrine with wooden idols—a terrible place that drifters and geologists try to avoid.

Somewhere in those areas, four years ago, a girl named Varvara Karpova disappeared. Her parents went to look for her—and vanished as well. The mother’s body was found with a gunshot wound, and the father has been missing ever since. The investigative team got stuck in snowdrifts on the way to the shrine, but luckily they managed to reach the only inhabited hut. There lived the keeper of old times and the creator of the local ethnographic museum, Tikhon Dikonov, with his wife and four children. He agreed to help the detectives with the investigation and suggested they visit his neighbor—the hermit Kazubov, who lives by the shrine in a snow-buried hut…

___________
“Alex Norman’s works deliver an incredibly accurate atmosphere of vague horror and danger. The plot unfolds smoothly, with a slight acceleration. The reader is always right beside the characters—he hears every sound, catches the smells, shivers with the northern cold, and stares with longing at the low, chilled sky. And while there are still no murders or blood, the anticipation of the looming drama is so strong that you have no will to put the book down and distract yourself with anything else. Norman’s command over thrillers over us is endless…” — Aleksei MAKEEV, writer, coauthor of detective novels about the detective Gurov