On November 5, 1942, a U.S. cargo plane on a routine flight slammed into the Greenland ice cap. Four days later, the B-17 assigned to the search-and-rescue mission hit thick fog and also crashed. Miraculously, x men on the B-17 survived. With the weather worsening, the U.S. military launched one last daring rescue mission, sending a Grumman Duck amphibious plane to find the men. Flying into a severe storm, the Duck and its Coast Guard crew vanished.

In this thrilling true-life adventure, Mitchell Zuckoff offers a spellbinding account of these harrowing crashes and the fate of the survivors and their would-be saviors. Full of evocative detail, Frozen in Time brings their extraordinary ordeal vividly into focus-a fight to stay alive and sane through 148 days of a brutal Arctic winter. Zuckoff takes us deep into the most hostile environment on earth and into the snow caves and tail section of the broken B-17 where the soldiers took refuge from subzero temperatures, hurricane force winds, and blinding blizzards. He places us at the center of a group of valiant men kept alive by sporadic military food drops until an expedition headed by famed Arctic explorer Bernt Balchen brought them to safety.

But that is only part of the story that unfolds in Frozen in Time. Moving forward to today, Zuckoff recounts the efforts of a loose-knit society of friends, led by an indefatigable dreamer named Lou Sapienza, who have worked for years to solve the mystery of the Duck’s last flight and recover the remains of its crew. Zuckoff also went on the mission and was one of two people who actually found the long-buried plane.

Drawing on intensive research, including interviews with the remaining survivors and their families and dedicated Coast Guardsmen, Frozen in Time is a breathtaking blend of mystery adventure, heroism, and survival. It is also a poignant reminder of the sacrifices of our military personnel and their families-and a tribute to the important, perilous, and often overlooked work of the US Coast Guard.