Zodiac Station by Tom Harper is published by Hodder, priced £16.99 (Kindle edition £8.99)

THERE is a moment in York author Tom Harper's latest icily-gripping thriller when you realise you can't quite trust what you're reading.

A narrator you feel you know is suddenly revealed as being not quite economical with the truth. And then it happens again. And again.

Zodiac Station is set on a remote scientific research station on an ice-locked island in the Arctic circle.

A US coastguard cutter is battering its way through the pack ice when a lone skier, half dead with cold and exposure, emerges out of a blizzard.

Tom Anderson claims to be a research scientist, and the sole survivor of an unspecified disaster at the Zodiac research station on the tip of the ice-bound island of Utgard.

Haltingly, he begins to tell his story: about the petty jealousies of a group of scientists cooped up in remote outpost; the mysterious death of a leading researcher; a growing sense of paranoia.

The coastguard cutter sends a helicopter to the research station, finding a burned out ruin - but also two more survivors. And their stories don't quite tally with that of Anderson: or with each-other...

The Arctic, as Tom describes it, is possibly the loneliest, most paranoid place on Earth. His fictional island of Utgard - slightly to the north of the real island of Svalbard - is a rocky waste covered in snow and ice. One side is a sweep of jagged mountain: the other an ice plain rising gradually to the Helbreen glacier. The temperatures are -20 or -30 degrees: and a wind whistles across the landscape, cutting into the face, stealing the breath. To be outside without the right survival clothing is to die.

Zodiac Station itself is the bleakest and most basic of stations: a "low, green oblong jacked up on spindly steel legs... covered with a mess of masts, aerials, satellite dishes and solar panels," as Tom describes it in his book. A perimeter is staked out around it from flags flying on red poles. Rules are that no-one is allowed beyond this without a rifle, in case of polar bears...

All this, plus a sinister mining company that has set up a base in a small inlet on the island's west coast and, further north, a long-abandoned Soviet coalmining town said to be inhabited only by ghosts

The book is set in early spring, when Utgard is just beginning to emerge from the long Arctic night in which the sun never rises above the horizon. Many of the scientists are suffering from cabin fever, and Zodiac is the perfect setting for sexual jealousy - there are just two women among the more than 20 research staff - and conspiracy theories to thrive. The inside of the station, with its tiny claustrophobic cabins and research labs opening off a long metal corridor, is spookily reminiscent of the spaceship Nostromo in Ridley Scott's classic film Alien. In the Arctic, no one can hear you scream...

Tom - real name Edwin Thomas - admits he had a ball writing the book. He spent ten days on the Arctic island of Svalbard himself to get a feel for the polar landscape. There really were signs warning of polar bears outside the settlement of Longyearbyen, where he stayed in an old mining barracks converted into a hostel, he says.

And the cold was like a physical thing, gripping and squeezing. "It was so cold that all the membranes in your nose froze, and your head hurt," he says. "You wore outer gloves, and inside those inner gloves. If you took off the outer gloves and wore only the inner gloves, within a minute your hands would be so numb that you couldn't put the gloves back on again."

That happens, with almost fatal consequences, to at least one of the characters in Zodiac Station. The cold, in fact, emerges as one of the principal dangers - that, and the mysterious mining company drilling for what may or may not be oil and gas off Utgard's western coast.

Perhaps what Tom enjoyed most about writing the book, however, was that whole unreliable narrator thing. Can you really trust what any of the book's handful of narrators are telling you? By the end, you'll probably be just as paranoid as any of the scientists stranded at Zodiac.

"That's something I have never done before, and it was really exciting to try," Tom says. "It is all very claustrophobic, and everyone at Zodiac Station is paranoid. Everybody has their own idea of what is going on. None of them are quite right - and some of them are deliberately deceptive..."

Sounds pretty much like people everywhere - except that most of us don't have to deal with a body that has fallen into a deep crevasse. Or with an ice-bound Soviet mining town full of ghosts. Or with those polar bears...

Zodiac Station by Tom Harper is published by Hodder, priced £16.99 (Kindle edition £8.99)

Tom Harper's last novel, The Orpheus Descent, has been chosen as this year's Big City Read in York