ARCTIC REVELATION

Debut author Finch’s international thriller features a young psychologist researching ancestral memory as a serial killer collects heads.

After Christian Yates completes his doctorate degree in psychology, he begins his career as an assistant professor. This career in academia is very short lived; Christian’s first lecture to undergraduates finds him quickly out of a job, as he has some views that are outside the mainstream. Specifically, he believes that humans have memories of their ancestors contained in their DNA. Although these memories are not readily available, they could be accessed, he posits, through some types of head trauma or the use of psychoactive substances, such as psychedelic mushrooms (hence the use of the latter in some Indigenous cultures). The undergraduates may lap this stuff up, but the senior faculty are simply not having it. All seems lost for Christian until he receives a mysterious job offer to work in Denmark: A company called Norkap Pharmaceuticals wants Christian’s help with their psychotropic drug research and is willing to offer him quite an impressive employment package. As the CEO, Hans Rasmussen, explains to Christian, his theories are “truer than you know.” Christian arrives in Denmark, where he comes under the wing of Hans’ nephew, Henrik. Henrik parties hard, and Christian does his best to keep up. He is also warned that Norkap may be engaged in unethical behavior. Meanwhile, a serial killer with a penchant for decapitation called “the Surgeon” is on the loose. It is believed that the Surgeon has killed eight people so far. The Surgeon is someone that Christian once met in the course of working with a patient who had “an unending flow of ancestral memories and languages that no human could have learned or faked.”

The premise of the story is a unique blend of speculative science and murder mystery—concepts like ancient memories do not typically come up in serial killer narratives. Still, while Christian’s students (the ones he has for one day, anyway) are certainly excited about his ideas, his expository lecturing can be dense. Though his speech gets one character worked up over the ethics of experimenting on worms, it throws an awful lot of information at the reader early on. This info dump, combined with a tragic event in Christian’s past and his difficulties with the patient who exhibited ancestral memories, make for slow-going early chapters. However, when the story moves to Denmark, the plot starts to jell, raising compelling questions (should Norkap be trusted?). When the action transfers to Greenland, Christian is informed almost immediately that he is in great danger—this is a thriller, after all, and peril becomes ever-present. Christian is later told, “We’re part of something far larger than ourselves, a saga that has unfolded over decades, leaving countless lives in ruins.” Serious stuff indeed—the reader can’t resist going forward to find out how it all connects.

A bit slow to get going, but the heady concept, action, and danger pay dividends.