The power was out, there was no hot food or drink to be had, and the body of George Younger, which had been refrigerated in a cake cabinet, was rapidly thawing. Melting ice has stopped the warming effect of the Gulf Stream, resulting in northern Europe, including Scotland, being hit by raging blizzards and ice storms. We’re only a handful of decades ahead and the landscape and environmental narrative is all very plausible which makes it even the more chilling a possibility, pun intended.

But Younger was no hill walker, and his discovery on a mountain-top near the Highland village of Kinlochleven, is inexplicable. L'histoire est bien ficelée, humaine et, quand on connaît l'Ecosse (de l'ouest en particulier), on se laisse emporter par l'intrigue. A chilling book, perhaps best read in summer as the descriptions bring to life the deep, deep cold of post climate change Scotland. The mix allows the story to develop in the way it does but there’s also a degree of incongruity about the whole thing.Many parts of the world are underwater or so hot as to be uninhabitable and the world's population is on the move. He has just been given a devastating medical prognosis by his doctor and knows the time has come to face his estranged daughter who has made her home in the remote Highland village.

Glasgow detective Cameron Brodie volunteers to attend a crime scene in the mountains where a body has been discovered frozen in the ice. Cameron Brodie, a veteran Glasgow detective, volunteers to be flown north to investigate Younger's death, but he has more than a murder enquiry on his agenda.An immensely satisfying and enjoyable read and it will stay with me for a long time to come, I’m sure. No wild, insanely-laughing and hooting gangs of killers/looters/madmen roaming the ravaged streets, their sole purpose to snuff out the few remaining embers of humanity (I should think the definitive masterpiece, “A Clockwork Orange”, would have sewn all of that up for us, and under a glass-topped coffee table whose “legs” are a naked, plasticized woman)! A young meteorologist checking a mountain top weather station in Kinlochleven discovers the body of a missing man entombed in ice.