The Midnight Sun Alibi
A 1920s Arctic Station Noir

About this book:

At 78 degrees north, the sun doesn't rise for fourteen weeks—and neither does the truth. When the ionosphere screams with auroral static and the only wireless for a thousand miles goes deaf, the seven men of Britain's Cape d'Auvry station are sealed in a wooden box with their secrets, their hatreds, and a killer who knows the polar night is the perfect alibi. Chief radio operator Arthur Vance has spent three winters translating the universe into dots and dashes; now he's hearing something in the static that isn't atmospheric noise, and the station's iron-willed director is willing to burn men alive to get his data to London.

As the temperature plunges toward forty below and the generator sputters, the expedition's fragile discipline fractures along fault lines of class, nationality, and buried pasts. A Norwegian ice-pilot who reads the wind like scripture. A darkroom technician with chemical-yellowed fingers and a private supply of developer that isn't for photographs. A physicist who knows the magnetometer is lying—and why. And in Vance's bunk, a leather-bound logbook recording debts that can only be settled in blood. The aurora paints the sky in green curtains, but the real specters are inside the wire, tapping codes on copper that no one in London will ever decode.

By the time the relief ship crashes through the spring ice, the station's final S.O.S. has long since dissolved into the ionosphere. What the rescuers find on the frozen shale of Cape d'Auvry rewrites the official report before the ink dries—because in a place where the sun doesn't rise, the only witness is the dark, and the only verdict is written in frostbitten fingerprints on a telegraph key. *The Midnight Sun Alibi* is Golden Age detection stripped to its skeleton: no drawing rooms, no comfortable alibis, just seven men, endless night, and the terrible arithmetic of survival.