Icefall by Michael Newman and Jon Land
There’s a moment early in Icefall where an Alaska state trooper pulls open the door of a stranded Amazon delivery van and finds the driver catatonic, frozen in place with Sinatra still playing softly on the radio. It’s a small, eerie image, and it tells you everything about what this book does well: take something mundane, drop it into the middle of the Alaskan wilderness, and let dread creep in before the story detonates.
Michael Newman and Jon Land have built a thriller with ancient-guardian mythology at its core, which gives it a flavor of its own. Buried beneath Mohenjo-daro for a thousand years, an artificial intelligence named Chronar has been watching over nine dormant beings, waiting for the one signal that justifies waking them: not human warfare, not natural disaster, but a threat from beyond the world itself. When that signal finally comes, the novel snaps into motion.
Alaska as the Perfect Pressure Cooker
What impressed me most is how confidently the book juggles its threads. There’s Sakari Muhtuk, a trooper with a reputation and a temper to match, teamed with her green partner Dennehy, investigating what like a case of a lost driver. There’s an astrobiologist couple, Kai and Jules Bevins, yanked from their lives in Pasadena in the middle of the night, their eleven-year-old daughter Charlie in tow, hauled out to a secret base camp on the Mendenhall Glacier with no explanation given. And there’s Chronar itself, patient and inhuman, counting down the centuries. Newman and Land cut between these perspectives.
The Alaska setting is one of the book’s smartest choices. Snowcats, whiteout storms, icefields that swallow sound and light — it’s a landscape primed for isolation, and the authors use it as more than backdrop. The cold becomes a character, amplifying the sense that something has surfaced here that nobody was built to survive.
The prose itself is lean but heavy on dialogue that snaps back and forth with personality, especially between Muhtuk and Dennehy, whose banter provides levity against the dread. Information arrives through action, and the pacing rewards readers who like their thrillers relentless. At the same time, there’s craft in how the mythology is doled out.
Icefall delivers a mounting sense of scale, characters worth rooting for and a premise strange enough to remember. Anyone who wants their apocalyptic sci-fi grounded in human stakes will find a lot to love here.
About Michael Newman:
Michael Newman is an entrepreneur and storyteller whose fascination with science, technology, and the human spirit drives his debut novel, Icefall. Written in collaboration with bestselling author Jon Land, Icefall launches an epic science-fiction thriller series exploring humanity’s connection to forces beyond comprehension and the cost of survival in an age of awakening.
A lifelong creator of companies and ideas, Newman brings the precision of a strategist and the imagination of a world-builder to his writing. He lives in Northern California with his family, dividing his time between new ventures and the worlds he creates on the page.
About Jon Land:
Jon Land is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling, award-winning author of nearly seventy books, including the critically acclaimed, award-winning Caitlin Strong Texas Ranger series. He has also teamed up with Heather Graham for the science fiction series The Rising, Blood Moon, and the forthcoming Dark Harbor. In recent years, Jon has transitioned further into the collaborative writing space. Among other titles, he penned the bestseller White Robes and Broken Badges which won the 2025 Andy Award for Narrative Nonfiction—the highest honor a collaborative title can receive. He has also penned fifteen others currently published or pending collaborative titles.
