Meet Alex Cross, a detective driven by instinct, empathy and an unrelenting mind.

Pushed to the brink of his moral and physical limits, he takes on the world's most dangerous criminals.

To understand him, you have to get inside his head.

Dive into James Patterson's definitive best-selling thriller series.

Brand new audiobook, Cross and Samson and the full Alex Cross series are on Spotify now.

Throughout history, there are countless examples of places or objects said to bring suffering to those connected with them,

earning a reputation for being cursed. In earlier episodes we have explored several of these

stories, from infamously unlucky motor vehicles to the final resting place of a convicted murderer.

In this episode, we turn our attention to the preserved remains of an Ice Age hunter,

a body some believe is linked to a series of unexplained deaths. Together, these events have

come to be known as the Iceman's Curse. I'm As he sat at his desk, scanning the brief his editor had just forwarded,

the young journalist felt a faint tightening behind his eyes.

It was not the length of the document that caught his attention, it was how little of it

there was.

The brief consisted of a single page, sparsely laid out,

listing the names of five individuals who had all died prematurely. At first glance, the cases

appeared unrelated. The deaths had occurred in different countries, years apart, and under markedly different circumstances.

Some had died in accidents, one after a sudden illness, others through causes that, on their

own, raised no immediate suspicion. There was no shared profession, no shared nationality, no obvious overlap that would normally justify linking them together in a single article.

Yet, his editor had done exactly that.

As the journalist read more carefully, he realised that the list was not asking him to explain how these

people had died, but why they had been grouped together at all. The only common thread

...