The Silent Barrier by Louis Tracy

Description

The novel’s first chapter is aptly named The Wish. Charles K. Spencer, a young American of wealth and nerve, has been reading the mail that marks the frontier of his ambitions, and when the opportunity arrives it carries him into the silence of the northern wilderness in pursuit of a treasure that other men have died describing. Around him at every turn, as unmovable as the ice, waits the barrier that gives the book its title, a loneliness so absolute that men go into it and do not return.

Tracy works a double line of suspense, the practical race against winter and weather and the psychological dread of a place that appears inhospitable by policy. His heroine is as game as his hero, and the partnership of the two threads, mystery and romance, is balanced as adroitly as the plot’s many trapdoors. The result is an adventure novel that keeps the reader running at altitude: short of breath, high of latitude and grateful for the cold air.

Why it deserves rediscovery

• A northern setting made genuinely threatening, not merely picturesque.
• A fortune plot with its ending hidden where the ice hides things.
• Tracy’s mastery of the chapter-ending hook.

About This DodaBooks Edition

The complete 17 chapters are reset in clean, continuous type with a working index.