BookView Review

What starts as a Cold War black-ops mission quickly morphs into something far more menacing in Bruce’s debut installment in the Broken Chronicles series. Set in 1978, the novel follows Captain William LaRivière, a former paratrooper turned Air Force officer, as he’s assigned to a secret joint mission with the U.S. military. His task: recover Soviet satellite tech that crashed in the Nahanni Valley, a remote, foreboding stretch of the Canadian North known as the Valley of Broken Skulls. As his team moves deeper into the wilderness, they find themselves facing not just the brutal elements and Soviet forces, but something ancient, something watching.

Bruce balances military realism with creeping horror, layering espionage, survival, and folklore into a tense, slow-burn thriller. Both beautiful and merciless, the Canadian North is vividly rendered, its vast, frozen expanse pressing in until the team’s presence feels like a violation. The horror isn’t just in what they find but in the creeping certainty that they were never meant to leave. A gripping mix of supernatural dread and survivalist tension, this is a winner.

Fans of “The Terror” by Dan Simmons and “Annihilation” by Jeff VanderMeer will want to take a look. 

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