Not a particularly interesting plot or characters, but what I appreciated about it was the early (and probably directionally accurate) observations of the mining construction boom in the interior of Labrador. The island had only been surveyed a few years prior to this book, so it says something impressive about Innes that he toured it and wrote about it with so much detail. ( )

As the title indicates, Innes' novel describes a godforsaken frozen wilderness in the Labrador region of Canada. Almost as frozen is the mystery of two expeditions to the interior, a place covered with forests, chilled to iced muskegs, gravel strewn plains, and a slew of lakes. Somewhere near the Lake of the Lion lies a gold mine. It was also the site of a crime two generations ago. It will in these pages narrated by Ian Ferguson become the rendezvous point for the descendants of that earlier generation.

Not only is there a classic quality to this adventure tale, a quest seeded with hints and vague clues that tease the reader along nicely, but there is an intimate dimension to its unfolding that is the hallmark of Hammond Innes at his best. Which was during the 1950s and 1960s. As is somewhat usual for the author, he has his hero plucked from a nice and cozy job in England and less than twenty-four hours later set adrift to survive in the harsh wilderness of northeastern Canada. Only the close bonds he forges with iconoclastic Canadians allows Ian Ferguson manages to survive where others have already fallen prey to the wind, the snow, the ice, and hunger.

This is the product of a middle aged Innes, but someone still in touch with the youthfulness of his hero, the 23 year old hero Ian Ferguson. And I suppose he still recollected enough of his own youthful follies to enable him to put into Ian the unpredictability, rashness, recklessness, and sometimes naive stupidity that both frustrates Ferguson as well as powers him on to his goal. There is no romance, here--at least not for Ian. Just a sense of mission and uncovering a mystery. And all set against the awesome loneliness of being adrift in a primeval wilderness. ( )

"Ian Ferguson alone held the key to the disaster that had overtaken a geological survey team more than 2,000 miles away. What drove him to make the perilous journey through the grim, lonely wastes of Labrador to the scene of the disaster? What was the link between this and similar events that had taken place in that same country 50 years earlier?

Hammond Innes travelled 15,000 miles to gain the authentic background for this novel, and for many months lived with the construction gangs engaged on building a great railway into the heart of Labrador, "the grimmest and most desolate country I have ever been in."
- jacket notes. ( )