In 1860, fifteen years after Sir John Franklin's ill-fated expedition disappeared in the Arctic, an obscure Cincinnati businessman named Charles Francis Hall set out to locate and rescue the expedition's survivors. He was an amateur explorer, without any scientific training or experience, but he was driven by a sense of personal destiny and religious and patriotic fervor. Despite the odds against him, he made three forays into the far North, the final -- and fatal--one taking him farther north than any Westerner had ever gone before. But Hall was suddenly taken ill on that voyage and died under mysterious circumstances.

Ninety-seven years later, Chauncey Loomis headed an expedition to Hall's grave in northwestern Greenland. He exhumed the frozen remains and performed an autopsy. His findings suggest that the investigators of Hall's death nervously sidestepped the damning evidence.

Loomis has written a masterful biography-cum-mystery that brilliantly evokes the lure of the Arctic and the brutal contest between man and nature.