The men on board the HMS Terror -- part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage -- are entering a second summer in the Arctic Circle without a thaw, stranded in a nightmarish landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. Endlessly cold, they struggle to survive with poisonous rations, a dwindling coal supply, and ships buckling in the grip of crushing ice. But their real enemy is even more terrifying. There is something out there in the frigid darkness: an unseen predator stalking their ship, a monstrous terror clawing to get in.

"The best and most unusual historical novel I have read in years." --Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe