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Mountain Ghost

1/1/2021

 
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Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $6.99 ebook
 
PEOPLE who disapear in the midst of an Arctic winter generally don’t resurface until the spring thaw begins.
When police data analyst Mats Lindström vanishes onto the slopes of Sweden’s highest mountain, Kebnekaise, leaving behind his wife Márjá and their infant son, it’s assumed he has walked off into the wilderness to commit suicide. His body will be found by hikers months from now.
In their home in Gällivare, a mining town above the Arctic Circle, Márjá isn’t convinced, however.
And when Lindström’s social media accounts are suddenly reactivated, she’s not alone in questioning the circumstances and seeking an investigation.
In Québec Inspector Etienne Gagnon recalls that around the time of his unexplained departure from Gällivare, Lindström was applying to join Polarpol, the elite multinational law-enforcement agency of which Gagnon is currently acting commander. Surely taking his own life isn’t the logical act of a man who is at the exact same time pursuing his next career move.
Determined to lead a private search for the missing policeman, the Canadian Mountie prepares to cross the Atlantic.
Meanwhile, in London Gagnon’s senior officer Constable Hákon Sigurðarsson – on leave as he struggles to recover from injuries suffered during a Polarpol operation in Iceland only days earlier – is making use of his time off duty to pursue a ‘ghost’ of his own: notorious assassin-for-hire Byrne Cantrell.
Cantrell has threatened Sigurðarsson’s sister and daughter; he cannot be allowed to remain at large.
On the run since slipping through the Polarpol net in Reykjavík, Cantrell has been exhausted by too many sleepless nights of moving constantly in his desperation to stay one step ahead of his pursuers, both official and otherwise.
This is the second instalment in Christoffer Petersen’s series of Polarpol Arctic thrillers, picking up the storyline immediately after the first novel, Northern Light, ends.

Invisible Touch

27/11/2020

 
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Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $6.99 ebook
 
WITH the nightmarish killing sprees of the previous Christmas and New Year now behind her, Police Commissioner Petra ‘Piitalaat’ Jensen is looking forward to spending this festive season unwinding quietly at home in Nuuk.
In the year 2043 Petra’s Greenland is finally independent of Denmark thanks to the successful referendum of almost 12 months earlier and starting to make its own way in the world. Nuuk is a peaceful, well-balanced, multicultural city with its distinct Dutch, Chinese and US quarters living in harmony to forge a prosperous and progressive future for the country.
There’s cause for much celebration for members of the Greenlandic police in particular, operating for the first time as a fully self-determining force answerable to no-one beyond its own borders.
Petra’s assistant Aron is recovering from injuries suffered in the course of intercepting a former colleague bent on disrupting Greenland’s self-government vote and Petra is once more contemplating the possibility of taking early retirement. Since the death of her long-time partner Constable David Maratse she hasn’t had her usual passion for enforcing the law. A low-key December is exactly what she needs as she weighs up her options.
Someone has other plans, however. Someone – it will be up to Petra’s officers to discover who – sees Advent not as a time of preparation, anticipation and relaxation but as an opportunity to settle old scores.
As the long dark nights envelop Nuuk, suddenly the run-up to Christmas starts to seem eerily familiar for Petra and her team.
Invisible Touch is the third in Christoffer Petersen’s series of Dark Advent literary ‘calendars’: stories written in distinct parts designed to be enjoyed one chapter at a time over in this case the first 24 days of December, allowing the reader to experience the action as it unfolds in Nuuk in real time.

Virusi

17/4/2020

 
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Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $0.99 Kindle e-book
 
GREENLAND is on red alert.
Clinging as it is on the outermost rim of the inhabited world, this enormous but sparsely populated island is just about as far removed from the tropical diseases of central Africa as it’s possible to be.
The arrival home of one infected traveller is all it takes to change that, however. Suddenly, with the identification of a critically ill returnee, a tiny islet off the mainland’s east coast is a potential threat to thousands of scattered Greenlanders stretching from far-flung settlements to the capital, Nuuk.
Aid worker Navana – now known officially as “patient zero” – is presenting with all the classic symptoms of a fast-moving virus. The fact she has only recently left a developing area of South Sudan bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo is particularly troubling to the health department.
Responsibility for ensuring residents of Niisarnaq comply with a hastily ordered lockdown rests with Constable David Maratse, a loner in the Greenlandic police force who finds himself on assignment in the minuscule community at exactly the wrong time.
Only hours earlier Maratse’s sole mission had been keeping the peace between two warring neighbours – a fisherman and a hunter – engaged a long-running local feud.
But with no law-enforcement backup available, insufficient protective clothing on hand and only an inexperienced trainee nurse on duty, corralling Niisarnaq’s population and at the same time stabilising Navana until help can be flown in is a nearly insurmountable challenge.
Petersen’s release of the 17th novella in his Arctic Shorts series is a timely gift to readers weathering the coronavirus pandemic in isolation, desperate to find a few hours of relief through a storyline that develops as quickly as its subject matter and in an exotic setting. Virusi’s skilful mirroring of real-world events makes for a perfect few hours of diversionary escapism.

Niche Writing

27/3/2020

 
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Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $7.99 Kindle e-book

WRITING being the solitary pursuit that it is, few readers have the chance to truly explore the steps through which their favourite books are born.
Challenging himself to lay bare his literary process does not intimidate Christoffer Petersen, however.
In recent years Petersen – a Brit whose chosen pen name is quintessentially Danish – has produced dozens of novels, novellas and short stories and at the same time established for this stable its own ‘Arctic noir’ niche.
Not only has Petersen created these stories, he has also doubled as the independent publisher of both hardcopy and electronic editions through Aarluuk Press. Most recently he has taken his involvement to the extreme by adding an e-book ordering portal to his website, enabling him to control the all-important sales and distribution.
Now, in a guide intended for “emerging authors, amateur writers and readers”, Petersen explores his chosen pathway in a step-by-step analysis of what has worked, and why, along his journey to becoming self-sufficient.
Characters such as David Maratse, Petra ‘Piitalaat’ Jensen, Fenna Brongaard, Freja Hansen and Jon Østergård are the human face of the battle against crime in Petersen’s Greenland and Denmark, occasionally venturing further afield to pursue a suspect in the US, Canada, the UK or Iceland. His own experiences in and understanding of these locations fuels descriptions with precisely the degree of detail that’s needed to engage the public and generate enticing backdrops to his action sequences.
Petersen’s ‘how to’ sections are grouped into two clear themes: ‘niche’ and ‘writing’ – the who, what, why, where, when and how of finding, defining, developing and populating a niche with original content that will sell, and of then sitting down at a desk to generate this. Presented in manageable, bite-sized chapters, his advice is both practical and motivational, delivering sound guidelines to drive planning and productivity.

The Calendar Man | The Twelfth Night

29/11/2019

 
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Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $5.99 each Kindle e-books

DANISH-BASED author Christoffer Petersen’s Christmas offering to fans of Arctic noir is a pair of seasonally themed novellas designed to be enjoyed progressively across the Advent–New Year period.
The action in the first of the two releases, The Calendar Man, begins on December 1 and continues in bite-sized chapters that can be read in less than 15 minutes per day throughout the lead-up to Christmas, culminating on Christmas Eve, when Scandinavians (including Greenlanders) celebrate by sharing meals and opening gifts together. It is the literary equivalent of the 24-part Julekalendere programs broadcast on television every year and the internationally popular windowed wall calendars.
The second picks up the storyline on January 5 and runs for 48 hours to end early on the morning immediately after Twelfth Night, or Mitaartut.
Both feature a cast of central characters introduced in Petersen’s previous series, set in the same location a quarter of a century earlier: police colleagues Petra ‘Piitalaat’ Jensen, Gaba Alatak, Aqqa Danielsen and Atii Napa and politician’s daughter Pipaluk Uutaaq from Greenland Crime, and Iiluuna Mattikalaat, a troubled child from Arctic Short Stories.
Even in 2042 serious crime is rare in Greenland – so rare that when an Advent calendar is found on a mutilated body in the capital, Nuuk, Commissioner Jensen is recalled to duty despite being on extended leave at the time.
First Minister Uutaaq is taking no chances with law and order in her rapidly developing city. A vote on independence from King Frederik’s Denmark is looming and nothing – not even a cryptic and very public corpse – can be allowed to derail the democratic process.
Juxtaposing the elements of a contemporary crime thriller with the warmth of traditional festivities in a remote, otherworldly setting, Petersen serves up a glimpse into a culture as exotic and mysterious to outsiders as it is rich and welcoming.

My Polar Dream

23/11/2018

 
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Jade Hameister: Macmillan Australia, $29.99
 
JADE Hameister has always been an exceptional achiever.
Aged six she walked to the summit of Mt Kosciuszko.
At 12 she convinced her parents to take her on a family hike through the Himalayas to Everest Base Camp.
The following year, at 13 Hameister set her sights on reaching the South Pole.
Only one obstacle stood in her way: the Hameisters’ chosen guide insisted she be at least 16 years old before attempting such a gruelling expedition.
Undaunted, she decided to kill time with a couple of relatively straightforward warm-up treks: to the North Pole and across the Greenland icecap.
Never having skied, she prepared with a few days’ training in New Zealand’s South Island, then set out from the Svalbard Archipelago in Norway determined to become the youngest person ever to ski entirely unsupported and unassisted from outside the final degree of latitude to the most northerly point in the world.
Along the way her youthful ambition, inspiring teenage message and passionate environmental focus caught the attention of both the National Geographic Society (which engaged a videographer to accompany Hameister and her father on each of their three increasingly taxing challenges) and the team behind the global phenomenon of TEDx talks.
Those same characteristics quickly drew the ire of a cohort of anonymous online trolls, however, who used the phrase “Make me a sandwich” to suggest Hameister’s true purpose as a woman should be to wait on men.
Her reply – along with the nearly three years’ worth of agony, frustration, ecstasy and relief that preceded it as she completed her sub-zero hat-trick – is recounted in Hameister’s own voice, from the joy of opening special letters written by her closest school friends to the physical torture of hauling twice her own bodyweight in a sled over jagged ridges of ice.

The Ice Star / In the Shadow of the Mountain

1/12/2017

 
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Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $1.30 / $3.99 Kindle e-books
 
COMPLETING a pair of novels in a single calendar year is a rare achievement for any writer; having a third title in the series launched within the same 12-month period is an almost-unheard-of feat.
Yet this is precisely what Danish author Christoffer Petersen will achieve when the final instalment in his Konstabel Fenna Brongaard trilogy is published in its English translation on Christmas Eve.
Petersen’s first Greenlandic thriller, The Ice Star, opens with the torture of young Danish military special forces operative Brongaard by two foreign mercenaries in a hut in an isolated settlement far above the Arctic Circle in northeastern Greenland.
Brongaard has been on assignment with the government’s sled-dog patrol, an elite unit established to defend the sovereignty of Denmark’s biggest and most remote territory. Now, she is in the hands of a pair of unrelenting inquisitors who have executed her partner and seem determined to frame her for the sickening murder.
Brongaard’s sole chance of escaping rests with David Maratse, a local policeman in the village in which she is being held.
Set against the severity of Greenland’s harsh, icebound, arid terrain, Brongaard’s desperate scramble for survival leads from tiny Scoresbysund across thickly packed sea-ice onto a luxurious coastal expedition ship, where the passengers turn out to be every bit as formidable as the pursuers she has so far evaded on land, and to the high-rise offices of cut-throat corporate Canada.
The suspense continues in In the Shadow of the Mountain, in which the life-or-death action is set in three immensely contrasting locations: cosmopolitan Copenhagen, the Arizona desert in the US and an exploratory mine site outside Greenland’s capital, Nuuk.
The third episode in this Bourne-like Nordic adventure, the soon-to-be-released The Shaman’s House, will feature an Australian connection, linking the world’s two major islands on diametrically opposite sides of the globe.

    ' Books are treasure for the spirit and ​the soul. '​
    — VB 2020

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