Journalist Michael Wildehis world recently shattered by tragedyhas come to the South Pole looking for solace and a new lease on life. But what he finds on a routine dive in the polar sea is something else entirely: the bodies of a young man and a young woman, bound with chains and sealed forever in a block of ice. Beside them is an ancient chest filled with a sinister cargo. Wilde's search to unravel the mystery of this doomed couple will lead from the battlefields of the Crimean War to the unexplored depths of the Antarctic Ocean, where an age-old curse survives to this day. And as the ice around the lovers begins to melt, Wilde will witness what may be a miracleor a nightmarein the making. What is dead, it turns out, is not always gone.