Alex Carter: Book 2
Publication Date: November 9, 2021
Wildlife biologist Alex Carter is back, fighting for endangered species in the Canadian Arctic and battling for her life in this action-packed follow-up to A Solitude of Wolverines, “a true stunner of a thriller debut” (James Rollins) and “a great read” (Nevada Barr).
Fresh off her wolverine study in Montana, wildlife biologist Alex Carter lands a job studying a threatened population of polar bears in the Canadian Arctic. Embedded with a small team of Arctic researchers, she tracks the majestic bears by air, following them over vast, snowy terrain, spending days leaning precariously out of a helicopter with a tranquilizer gun, until she can get down on the ice to examine them up close.
But as her study progresses, and she gathers data on the health of individual bears, things start to go awry. Her helicopter pilot quits unexpectedly, equipment goes missing, and a late-night intruder breaks into her lab and steals the samples she’s collected. She realizes that someone doesn’t want her to complete her study, but Alex is not easily deterred.
Managing to find a replacement pilot, she returns to the icy expanses of Hudson Bay. But the helicopter catches fire in midflight, forcing the team to land on a vast sheet of white far from civilization. Surviving on the frozen landscape is difficult enough, but as armed assailants close in on snowmobiles, Alex must rely on her skills and tenacity to survive this onslaught and carry out her mission.
When governmental mandates threaten a private enterprise, the polar bear population finds itself on the losing end. In A Blizzard of Polar Bears, author Alice Henderson provides a suspenseful story set in the Canadian Arctic.
Dr. Alex Carter is conducting a study on the polar bear population. The data she finds will help the government determine whether stricter mandates should be in place to offset climate change. There’s rich detail surrounding the process of tagging the bears, along with what information can be gleaned. This part of the story was particularly fascinating.
The action ramps up when there’s a break-in at the lab, coupled with strange things happening. Alex finds herself in the middle of something sinister with no one to trust except for Casey, a man who appears to be keeping secrets. With dead polar bears, gunmen lying in wait, and a cipher holding possible answers, Alex is in a race against time to put all the pieces together. What she finds is almost beyond belief.
Because of the intertwined stories happening within the book, the flow isn’t quite as smooth as expected. However, these stories are important because they provide significant historical detail relating to the plot. What appears to be very simple on the surface turns out to be quite complicated.
A Blizzard of Polar Bears explores an interesting topic while delivering an action-packed sequence of events.
Alice Henderson’s love of wild places inspired her new thriller series, which begins with A Solitude of Wolverines, as well as her novel Voracious, which takes place in Glacier National Park.
Alice is a dedicated wildlife researcher. Using a variety of methods including bioacoustic studies, she undertakes wildlife surveys to determine what species are present on lands that have been set aside for conservation. There she ensures there are no signs of poaching and devises of ways to improve habitat. Using geographic information systems (GIS), she also designs wildlife corridors and builds habitat suitability models and species distribution models. She has surveyed for the presence of grizzlies, wolves, spotted owls, wolverines, jaguars, endangered bats, and more.
She has also written media-tie in novels, including official novels for the TV shows Supernatural and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. While working at LucasArts, she wrote material for several Star Wars video games.
She was selected to attend Launchpad, a NASA-funded writing workshop aimed at bringing accurate science to fiction. She holds an interdisciplinary master’s degree.
