Severobor

Some winters never end.

Dr. Rafael Volkov is a 36-year-old forensic pathologist from Massachusetts. Half Brazilian, half Russian, fluent in three languages, divorced, still carrying the case he missed a year ago. He is the pathologist you call when a death doesn't fit the pattern.

In the first week of December, a Russian FSB analyst named Natalya Voronova calls him to consult on twelve miners who have vanished from a closed industrial town on the Taymyr Peninsula. The polar night begins in three days. The town is called Severobor. The mining combine is calling the disappearances industrial accidents. The bodies Rafael examines in the local morgue are not from industrial accidents.

Impossible blood loss. Feeding marks from no carnivore he can name. A Nganasan elder who has been waiting for someone to ask the right question for fifty years. A sealed tunnel at the bottom of a Gulag-era shaft that was broken open from the inside. And in the darkness of an abandoned camp ten kilometers from town, something that has been hunting this ground since long before the Gulag was built - something that clicks like cicadas and bones cracking, that arranges the bodies of the dead with precise care, and that knows every victim's name before it takes them.

By the time Rafael understands what he is looking at, he has already been bitten. By the time he understands what the bite has done to him, he is already changing. And on a fragment of parchment in the ruins of a nest, in Church Slavonic that no one has written for seven hundred years, a single name is waiting for him:

Konstantin.

Severobor is Book One of Calix Sanguinis - a propulsive, historically grounded horror thriller about the first of three cases that will take Rafael Volkov from the Siberian cold to the Brazilian rainforest to a cave outside the former city of Ryazan, where a priest walked into the dark in December 1237 and never fully came back.

For fans of Justin Cronin's The Passage, Christopher Buehlman's The Lesser Dead, Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts, and Adam Nevill's The Ritual.

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