Antarctica…Brr, cold just thinking about Icy Passage by Ann Gimpel. So, I’ll put on some warm clothes because the adventure is about to begin. Could this be a Twilight Zone episode? Add me to Goodreads now

Icy Passage by Ann Gimpel

Dream Shadow Press

110K words

Release Date: 2/29/16

Genre: Supernatural thriller romance

MY REVIEW

Icy Passage by Ann Gimpel is a paranormal, science fiction romance that I would recommend for adults. I find it funny that tourists travel there, buying kick knacks and such. I can think of so many other places I woud go, like a warm sandy beach with palm trees.

We start right out with trouble at the US base, McMurdo, in Antarctica. Micah’s study was running wild, causing two deaths. Archaea – pyro karyotes, microorganisms. You don’t need to know all the technical details to know something hinky is going on with them. Are they sentient? Help is on the way in the form of Brynn and Kayna.

Kayna is an MD, but she also has special abilities, paranormal abilities. She has a raven for a spirit guide. I love how she describes herself as a flaming bitch, saying what she thinks as she sees it. Her curt manner rubs people the wrong way at times. Sounds a bit like me.. LOL

Brynn’s getting on a ship with his archaea, leaving South Georgia Island, heading to McMurdo. Kayna is on the same ship, heading to the same place. What follows is predictable, but I am so happy to be on the journey with them anyway. I couldn’t help but chuckle when they first met. The immediate attraction goes both ways.

Kayna is strong, loyal and committed. Brynn is the hero, the knight in shining armor we would all want by our side in times of danger. He accepts on faith that there is more than meets the eye, conquering his fear, willing to fight to the death to save her. I love that Brynn is a supernatural fan, so he fits right in.

Her dead father has his own agenda and they will come to blows.

Chris is a great guy, flawed, but friendly, like the little puppy that follows you around, wanting to be your friend. He became a character that I admired and looked forward to seeing.

As if the archaea aren’t enough of a problem, World War III looms on the horizon. How far will the United States and Russia go to make their point?

Celtic and Chinese lore and mythology converge, creating a wonderful paranormal fantasy. An icy world, days without sun, WWIII and nuclear weapons, the Shama’s dragon spirit, magic, traveling between here and the Otherworld.

The writing makes this combination of genres read as if it could really happen. Even some of the less desirable peripheral characters step up to the plate when challenged. The romance is hot and steamy, loving as if there may be no tomorrow. Maybe it is more than their hearts and bodies talking to each other. Maybe it is their magic too.

If you think everything is connected, this book will make you a believer.

Check out Ann Gimpel’s bio. Could her camera contribute to her inspiration?

I received a copy of Icy Passage by Ann Gimpel in return for an honest review.

  4 Stars

ABOUT THE BOOK

Tumble into the icy danger of Antarctica with a blazing hot romance. Mittens and fan required.

Book Description:

Fresh out of residency, Dr. Kayna Quan opts for a tour in Antarctica. Money is short, so she hires on as medical officer aboard a Russian research vessel headed for McMurdo Station. Primed for almost anything, she plays her paranormal ability close to the vest.

Stationed on remote South Georgia Island for two years, Brynn McMichaels is eager for a change. When cultures of the single-celled organism, archaea, overgrow their bins in his lab and begin shifting into another form, he worries he’s losing his mind and talks with scientists at McMurdo, but they have problems of their own—bad ones. Brynn agrees to help. The weather’s too uncertain to send a plane, so he hitches a ride aboard Kayna’s ship and brings his mutant culture colonies along.

Attraction sparks, urgent, hot and powerful, between Brynn and Kayna, but her disclosure about her magic is a tough nut to crack. It doesn’t help that her dead father is stalking her. Lethal cultures, bizarre illness, and McMurdo’s refusal to let them land force Brynn and Kayna into an uneasy alliance. Will their fragile bond be enough to thwart the powers trying to destroy Earth, and them along with it?

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Excerpt from Icy Passage:

Chapter One

Micah Greenwich sucked air as he pushed up from his squat, a weight bar balanced across his shoulders. He did one more squat before a wave of dizziness threatened to bring him to his knees. Gasping, he shucked the bar onto pins protruding from the back of the squat rack and grabbed one of the metal stanchions for support. A headache pounded behind one eye, and he felt nauseous.

“What the fuck is wrong with me?” he muttered, still clinging to the metal cage shoved in a back corner of the gym at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. No one was in the gym. Not at this hour. Granted, the perpetual night for part of the year, followed by perpetual day, yielded some odd circadian rhythms, but Micah rarely had competition for any of the gym machines or weight equipment late at night.

He glanced at the weight plates balanced on the ends of the forty-five pound bar, thinking perhaps he’d misjudged and put too much weight on it, but that wasn’t the issue. He shrugged. Maybe he was getting sick. Something was going around. So far, he’d been lucky during his brief stint at the southern end of the Earth and had avoided the colds and flus McMurdo residents passed among themselves like candy.

He wiped sweat from his face with a ratty towel and decided to call it a night—at least for working out. He still needed to stop by his lab. Because he was the newest and greenest microbiologist, he’d been assigned archaea, the most ancient single-celled life form on the planet. His cultures had taken a decidedly odd turn, though, a couple of weeks back—growing like mad and not looking like any prokaryote he’d ever seen. While he might have started with archaea, what was in his bins didn’t look much like them anymore.

Another wave of nausea battered him, and he folded his arms around his midsection, wondering if he was going to vomit. Saliva flooded his mouth, but he choked it back. Even though he didn’t feel like doing anything beyond finding his bed, he left the gym and made his way three buildings over to his lab. McMurdo was a series of prefab buildings with interconnecting doors and insulated tunnel-walkways, so you didn’t have to go outside into the weather. Antarctica never got particularly warm, and nights were always bitter.

He glanced out a window at an inky sky shot with stars, and a reluctant smile split his face. It might be minus something outside, but it was beautiful too. He’d always loved wild, remote places, and Antarctica was about as wild and remote as it got—shy of signing up to be an astronaut, which was a long-standing dream of his.

Micah frowned, wondering if the astronaut gig was even possible. The United States had cut their funding for the space program rather dramatically. Besides, he needed more in the way of credentials to even be considered for something like that. With another swipe at his still sweaty face—the more he thought about it, the surer he was he was coming down with the flu—he pushed open the door to his lab and froze, not believing his eyes.

“Britta?” he called. “Marguerite!”

The women didn’t answer. They sprawled face down on the floor in front of his main workbench, clearly passed out. Wondering if they’d gotten into the high-grade, ethyl alcohol he used to preserve things, he called their names again, louder this time. The longer he looked at them, the weirder he felt. They were too still. Sudden fear gripped him, making the nausea worse.

“Jesus fucking Christ. Why me?” he muttered, and raced to the women. He bent, grabbed Britta’s shoulder, and shook her. When she didn’t respond, he flipped her over and stared at her cherry red face.

Fighting a deeply sinking feeling, he turned Marguerite over. She looked just like her friend and roommate. Micah squatted next to them and laid his fingers across their necks, searching for a pulse.

Nothing.

He placed his ear over their hearts, willing there to be something, anything, before he started CPR. Still nothing. He ground his teeth together, unnerved. How could there possibly be two dead women in his lab?

Even though he was pretty sure it wouldn’t do any good, he tilted Marguerite’s head back and breathed into her mouth before doing chest compressions. When he looked over at Britta, he understood he had to have help and lurched to his feet. Snapping up the wall phone, he punched in the after hours code for the clinic. As soon as one of the nurses answered, he screeched, “Send help now. Third micro lab.”

His headache worsened. So did his twisting, roiling guts, but he went back to the women. He didn’t need to be a doctor to recognize death. Despite the futility, he alternated CPR from one to the next. Five long minutes passed—but they felt like five years—before the door burst open.

“Christ!” One of the docs—Stewart maybe, Micah was too rattled to take a good look—pulled him off Marguerite. A tall, broad-shouldered woman Micah didn’t recognize examined Britta.

“Looks like carbon monoxide poisoning to me,” the female medic said flatly. “This one’s well past CPR.”

Dr. Stewart rocked back on his heels. “Yeah, her too.” He trained his blue eyes on Micah. “What happened?”

Micah shook his head. “Damned if I know. I just got here. I had dinner in the mess hall, worked out in the gym, and then I swung by here to check on my cultures.”

The woman narrowed her eyes and half-crawled to where Micah sat on the floor. She folded her fingers over his wrist and took him in with practiced hazel eyes. Her reddish hair was short, almost in a butch cut. She pressed her lips into a harsh line, frowning.

“I’m Ariana,” she said, letting go of his wrist. “One of the nurse practitioners. How have you been feeling?”

“Bad,” he admitted. “Think I finally succumbed to the community disease everyone else has.”

Dr. Stewart joined them and squatted next to Micah. He ran a hand down the side of Micah’s neck and listened to his chest with a stethoscope before exchanging a pointed glance with Ariana. “Where’s the CO meter in here?” he asked.

Micah gestured behind him. “On that wall.” He twisted to look at it, but the indicator light was green—safe. Maybe it was defective. His scientifically trained mind arranged informational bits into an unpleasant pattern. “The women,” he said. “If I’d been firing on all cylinders, I’d have figured it out as soon as I looked at the color of their faces. They died from carbon monoxide poisoning, didn’t they?”

“Probably.” Dr. Stewart said cautiously. “But it’s conjecture at this point.”

“That cherry red color is a dead giveaway,” Ariana said with conviction. “Nothing else will do that.”

“We’ll wait for an autopsy before we make statements like that.” The doctor eyed his colleague coolly.

“Yes, Doctor. Sir. King of all things medical.” She set her lips in a thin line, clearly biting back further sarcasm. “Meantime,” she ground out, “I’m pretty sure he—” she jabbed a finger at Micah “—has whatever killed these two.” She stood and punched numbers into the wall phone. “I’m calling security.”

Dr. Stewart sifted his hands through his untidy, blond hair. “Tell them to alert maintenance. Until we figure out what killed these two, we’ve got to get out of here. Now.”

Micah straightened. “Wait a minute,” he sputtered. “The meter says it’s safe. For all we know, Britta and Marguerite got poisoned elsewhere and just happened to be in here cleaning when they collapsed.”

Dr. Stewart got to his feet and hauled Micah upright. “For tonight, we’ll put you in the infirmary and run tests to check if your hemoglobin’s been compromised. I’ve got to alert the boss and talk with base security. We’ll to get to the bottom of this.”

“But my lab—”

Dr. Stewart made a chopping motion with one hand, and the rest of Micah’s protest died unspoken.

Ariana hung up the phone and nodded at Dr. Stewart. “You take care of the boss. I’ll deal with security and maintenance. Need to get the gas sniffer in here to make sure there’s not a leak.”

Micah tried to focus, but the room spun crazily. He really was wiped out. Much more tired than a thirty-year-old man had a right to feel.

“Can you walk?” Dr. Stewart nudged him.

Micah focused bleary eyes on the physician. “Yeah. I think so.”

“How are you feeling?” Ariana asked the doctor.

He shrugged. “Normal. But it takes time for exposure to take a toll. Micah probably lives in this lab, except when he’s asleep.”

“Yeah, but,” Micah pointed out, “those women didn’t. They clean all the science labs. Maybe one of the other ones is the problem.”

The doctor folded an arm around Micah’s waist supporting him, and led him out of the lab. “I’m on it. By the time you wake up, we’ll know more.”

Micah staggered through the door, flanked by Dr. Stewart and Ariana. “What are you going to do about the women?” he asked.

“You were there when I alerted base security. They’ll take care of them,” Ariana assured him. “For tonight, focus on getting well.”

* * * *

It hadn’t been just that night, though. Micah spent the next three days in the infirmary sucking bottled oxygen. When that didn’t clear his red blood cells fast enough, the doctors ordered chelation treatments. In the meantime, he had a chance to think, and he didn’t care for what he came up with. Besides, it was so fantastic, no one would believe him.

Maintenance had given his lab, and the other three microbiology studios, a clean bill of health, which meant he could go back to work tomorrow. Even more disturbing, the entirety of the science wing where the dead women cleaned showed zip in the way of evidence of a gas leak. In the interest of thoroughness, maintenance had checked the female dorms too, and found exactly nothing. Autopsy was conclusive regarding cause of death, but no one could figure out how the women had been exposed to a big enough dose of carbon monoxide to kill them.

The same was true for him—major exposure to something pigging up his hemoglobin, but without an identifiable source. Another few hours without medical intervention and he’d have been just as dead as Britta and Marguerite.

Armed with that knowledge—and a phalanx of unanswered questions—Micah spent his downtime in the infirmary mapping out a series of tests to run on his strange archaea colonies. He had suspicions, but needed facts before he presented them to Jack DeVoe, the man in charge of McMurdo operations. If he went to him now, Jack, who had a Ph.D. in biochemistry, would laugh him right out of his office. And there would go Micah’s hopes of earning his chops, so he could go on to something more prestigious than working at McMurdo Station.

ABOUT ANN GIMPEL

Ann Gimpel is a national bestselling author. A lifelong aficionado of the unusual, she began writing speculative fiction a few years ago. Since then her short fiction has appeared in a number of webzines and anthologies. Her longer books run the gamut from urban fantasy to paranormal romance. Once upon a time, she nurtured clients, now she nurtures dark, gritty fantasy stories that push hard against reality. When she’s not writing, she’s in the backcountry getting down and dirty with her camera. She’s published over 30 books to date, with several more planned for 2016 and beyond. A husband, grown children, grandchildren and wolf hybrids round out her family.

Find Ann At:  Website  /  Blog  /  Amazon  /  Facebook  /  @AnnGimpel (for Twitter)

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