If you were fortunate enough to have read LEAVE NO TRACE, the opening installment in the National Parks thriller series, you will have a fairly good idea of what to expect in the second book, COLD BURN. If you’re a newcomer, my advice would be to buckle up and prepare for a wild ride.

A. J. Landau is a pseudonym for authors Jon Land and Jeff Ayers. Their combined talents make for a formidable literary tag team as their impeccable research, historical correlation, and high-octane thrills shine through in their writing.

Following the Prologue, set in Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska, a team of scientists and their guide get caught in an unexpected avalanche and are later trapped in a cave where they have sought shelter. Next, we become reacquainted with National Park Service investigator Michael Walker and are reminded of the losses that he still deals with --- a mostly severed foot and the loss of his beloved wife at the hands of poachers.

"COLD BURN is both a fun and frightening ride. If you enjoy Preston & Child, James Rollins, Brad Thor, and a touch of Brad Meltzer, you absolutely will devour this book. The next National Parks thriller cannot come fast enough!"

Walker is working on busting a smuggling ring that is targeting Alaskan native artifacts. FBI special investigator Gina Delgado, with whom he teamed up in the first book to take down domestic terrorists, is looking into a mysterious death in the Florida Everglades region. Little do they know that their missions will converge as part of a potential global threat that no one could have seen coming.

The body that washed up (surprisingly whole) in the Everglades turns out to be a young scientist. Delgado must figure out what he was working on that could have marked him for death. Meanwhile, Walker is apprehending a shooter who just gunned down a pair of adults who were traveling with their two teenage children at an Alaskan museum. Even this seemingly isolated incident factors into the bigger picture in yet another piece of brilliant plotting. Once Walker obtains some of the smuggled artifacts, he finds that they have something odd in common. Each item is a box filled with a black powdery substance with which he is not familiar.

Delgado is learning a new term while Walker is having what seems to be a breakthrough in his case: Cold Burn. This dichotomy of ideas is literally defined as the collapse of a series of ocean current subsystems caused by global warming and other environmental factors. One of the side effects of this activity is the “awakening” of an ancient element that can freeze a body from the inside out. For Delgado, this explains her other investigation involving an American submarine that sunk to the bottom of the ocean floor after being inadvertently hit by a mine from World War II. All 120 seamen aboard were found frozen to death.

Walker has a similar experience when he partners with an Alaskan native who shows him a beach where thousands of fish have washed up --- all apparently frozen to death from the inside out. When he and Delgado eventually chat with each other and exchange notes, they realize that there is something much larger at play here. Delgado gets herself back to Alaska to join forces with Walker once again --- this time to save the world.

COLD BURN is both a fun and frightening ride. If you enjoy Preston & Child, James Rollins, Brad Thor, and a touch of Brad Meltzer, you absolutely will devour this book. The next National Parks thriller cannot come fast enough!