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

'Fuck! What is that thing?'

The cabin was preparing to stop. They were nearly there. The shape grew larger.

'Holy mother of God!'

It was no butterfly; nor was it a bird.

The cabin stopped; the doors opened automatically.

An icy gust thick with snowflakes whipped their faces. But no one got out. They stood there staring at this work of madness and death. They already knew that they would never forget what they had just seen.

part 1
The Man Who Loved Horses

1

The Pyrenees. Diane Berg watched them loom into sight as she drove over the hill. A white barrier, still quite far away, stretching the entire breadth of the horizon, hills breaking like waves against it. A raptor tracing circles in the sky.

Nine o'clock in the morning, the tenth of December.

Judging by the road map on the dashboard, she should take the next exit and head south, towards Spain. She had neither GPS nor sat nav on board her elderly Lancia. She saw a signpost above the motorway: 'Exit 17, Montréjeau/Spain, 1,000 m.'

Diane had spent the night in Toulouse. A budget hotel, a tiny room with a tiny television and a bath made of moulded plastic. During the night she had started awake to the sound of repeated screaming. Her heart pounding, she sat up at the head of the bed, on full alert, but the hotel remained perfectly silent, and she was beginning to think she had merely dreamt it when suddenly the screaming started again, louder than ever. Her stomach tied itself in knots until she realised it was only cats fighting below her window. She had trouble getting back to sleep after that. Only the day before she had still been in Geneva, celebrating her departure with colleagues and friends. She had gazed at her surroundings, there in her room at the university, and wondered what the view from her next room would be.

In the hotel car park, as she was unlocking her Lancia, melted snow sliding from car roofs all around her, she grasped that she was leaving her youth behind. And she knew that before a week or two had gone by she would have forgotten her life from before. A few months from now she would have changed, utterly and profoundly. In light of where she would be staying for the next twelve months, how could it be otherwise? 'Just be yourself,' her father had advised. As she pulled out of the little rest area back onto the motorway, already busy with traffic, she wondered if the changes would be positive ones. Someone once said that there are adaptations that are more like amputations, and she could only hope that this would not be the case for her.

She could not stop thinking about the Institute.

All those people shut away in there.

All day long the previous day, Diane had been haunted by this thought: I'll never manage. I won't be up to it. Even though I've prepared myself, and I'm the best person for the job, I have absolutely no idea what to expect. And the people there will see right through me.

She was thinking of them as people, human beings, and not . . . monsters. And yet that is what they were: individuals who were genuine monsters, people as far removed from her own self and her parents and everyone she knew as a tiger is from a cat.

Tigers . . .

That was how she had to think of them: unpredictable, dangerous, capable of inconceivable cruelty. Tigers shut away in the mountain . . .

When she came to the tollbooth, she discovered she'd been so absorbed by her thoughts that she had no clue where she'd put her ticket. The operator gave her an exasperated look as she searched frantically through the glove box and her handbag. Yet there was no hurry: there was no one in sight.

At the next roundabout she headed for Spain and the mountains. After a few kilometres the flat plain came to an abrupt end. The first foothills of the Pyrenees rose from the earth and the road was surrounded by round, wooded knolls that were nothing like the high, ridged summits she could see in the distance. The weather changed, too; the snowflakes were falling more thickly.

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.