The Last Latitude

His mother died mapping a place the world agreed to forget. Then he found twelve pixels that should not be there. For six years, Leo Vasquez has watched the same twelve pixels flicker on a satellite map of Antarctica. Nobody can explain them. No agency will admit they are there. And they sit a short flight from the station where his mother, a cartographer who spent her life charting the continent, died with her last discovery unspoken. Now he has finally reached McMurdo. And the flicker is not noise, and it is not error. The pattern under the ice has held for exactly as long as his mother has been dead. What the pattern guards is older than every story we tell about ourselves, and the machinery built to keep it buried has had six decades of practice. With five others thrown together by chance, and a truth his mother died protecting, Leo has one chance to reach the last latitude before the men who erase things reach him. For readers of Blake Crouch and Dan Brown: a propulsive conspiracy thriller built on real history, real places, and one impossible discovery at the bottom of the world.

Cole Winters writes speculative thrillers built on real, checkable history, the kind of book where you stop mid-chapter to check whether something actually happened. The Last Latitude is his first novel. Six new arrivals reach the bottom of the world and find a record that stops explaining itself. It is an Antarctic conspiracy thriller for readers of Blake Crouch and Dan Brown. He is drawn to the places where documented history and plausible speculation sit uncomfortably close together.