New Books
In the Works
A behind-the-scenes look at future works from author and science storyteller Chip Walter—spanning fiction, nonfiction, and everything in between.
White Out (Working Title)
The town of Utqiagvik at dawn. — Photo - Chip Walter
A Schuster McCoy Mystery
Publication: 2026
Genre: Mystery
My new mystery novel — a work in progress.
Meet Schuster McCoy—sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued, and freshly defrocked. Once a rising evolutionary psychologist, her science career implodes, and she’s forced back to her frigid hometown—Utqiagvik, Alaska (formerly Barrow)—the northernmost habitation in the United States and ancestral home of the Inupiaq people. And she’s not too happy about it.
Living with her quick-witted Inupiaq grandmother, Schuster takes a part-time job at the National Arctic Research Laboratory (NARL). It seems simple enough—until she chases off a rogue polar bear on the tundra and discovers a mutilated corpse in the snow.
Drawn into the mystery, Schuster finds herself entangled in a web of old lies, small-town rivalries, whaling politics, and the deep currents of Inupiaq tradition. To uncover the truth, she’ll need every ounce of her psychological insight—and the courage to track down the lethal killer that lives in plain sight.
The idea for this novel first lodged itself in my cranium after I visited Barrow, Alaska — now known officially as Utqiaġvik. I was there researching my nonfiction book for National Geographic, Immortality Inc. Utqiaġvik is the northern most human habitation in the United States, so deeply inserted into the Arctic Circle that there is nothing between it and the North Pole except the wild waters of the Beaufort Sea. It is simultaneously one of the ugliest and most arresting places that I have ever seen — and for that reason, it insisted I make a mystery out of it.