Excerpt from The Frozen Dead by Bernard Minier, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The other way to get to the station's entrance was by helicopter – but only in emergencies. A pad had been built near the upper lake, accessible in good weather.

'Joachim is right,' said the oldest among them. 'With weather like this, the chopper wouldn't even be able to land.'

They all knew what this meant. Once the gates were opened, thousands of cubic metres of water from the upper lake would come roaring down into the tunnel they had just used. In the event of an accident, it would take two hours to drain the tunnel again, another hour through the tunnel by tractor to get back to the access shaft, fifteen minutes to get back up to the open air, ten to go down by cable car to the production facility and another half-hour by road to reach Saint-Martin-de-Comminges – provided the road wasn't blocked.

If there were an accident, they wouldn't be able to reach the hospital for four hours or more. And the power station was getting old . . . It had been in operation since the 1920s. Every winter, before the snows melted, they spent four weeks up there, cut off from the world, for the maintenance and repair of machines from another era. A difficult, dangerous job.

Huysmans watched as an eagle glided on the belly of the wind, roughly a hundred metres from the cabin.

Silence.

He turned to gaze at the dizzying frozen expanses below.

Three enormous pressure pipelines dropped vertiginously towards the abyss, moulded to the flank of the slope. The valley had vanished from their field of vision some time ago now. The last support tower was visible three hundred metres further down, standing there alone in the midst of the fog, where the flank of the mountain created an escarpment. Now the cable car was climbing straight to the access shaft. If the cable were to break, the cabin would fall several dozen metres before smashing like a nutshell against the rock face. In the blizzard it was swinging like a basket on a housewife's arm.

'Hey, chef! What's for dinner this time?'

'Nothing organic, that's for sure.'

Only Huysmans did not laugh; he was watching a yellow minibus on the road to the power station's offices down in the valley. The manager's. Then the bus too disappeared from view, swallowed by banks of clouds like a stagecoach surrounded by Indians.

Every time he went up there he felt he was on the verge of discovering some fundamental truth about his existence. But he could not determine what it was.

Huysmans turned to look towards the peak.

They were nearing the terminus of the cable car – a metal scaffold clinging to the start of the access shaft. Once the cabin had come to a halt, the men would set off down a series of footbridges and staircases until they came to the concrete blockhouse.

The wind was howling violently. It must be at least minus ten degrees.

Huysmans narrowed his gaze.

There was something unusual about the shape of the scaffold. Something that shouldn't be there . . .

Like a shadow between the steel girders and cross-braces, swept by the gusts of wind.

It's an eagle, he thought; an eagle's got caught in the cables and pulleys.

No, that would be absurd. And yet that's what it was: a huge bird, its wings spread wide. Maybe a vulture, imprisoned in the superstructure, tangled in the bars and railings.

'Hey, look at that!'

Joachim's voice. He'd seen it, too. The others turned to look at the platform.

'Christ almighty! What is it?'

It's no bird, that's for sure, thought Huysmans.

He felt a vague anxiety welling inside. The thing was hanging above the platform, just below the cables and pulleys, as if suspended in the air. It looked like a giant butterfly, a dark, evil butterfly staining the whiteness of snow and sky.

Excerpted from The Frozen Dead by Bernard Minier. Copyright © 2014 by Bernard Minier. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Minotaur. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.