Bernard Besson is Honorary Controller General of the French National Police and an expert in economic intelligence. He is notably the author of Main basse sur l’Occident.

“With an apocalyptic roar, Greenland’s Lauge Koch Kyst region had broken off from the mainland and was drifting into Baffin Bay. A gigantic crevasse, hundreds of metres deep, had ripped through the centre of the island continent and left a trench covering dozens of kilometres. An invisible axe had sundered the ice cap in two.”

So opens Bernard Besson’s latest thriller. The violence here is not just the work of the much-announced demise of the Arctic ice cap. A ship, belonging to the French geological prospecting company Terre Noire, is in serious trouble in the area. But why is a well-paid professional killer roaming over the icy wastes with a mission to attack scientific explorers? What exactly is Terre Noire looking for? What does its Canadian rival North Land hope to find?
Unravelling these mysteries is the task of two former French-Intelligence agents, John Spencer Larivière and his Eurasian partner Victoire. They will discover that in the glacial silence of the Great North a merciless war is being waged — a war for the control of oil and gas resources.