Resolving to earn so much money that his mother will no longer stress out over the bills, eleven-year-old Timmy Failure launches a detective business with a lazy polar bear partner named Total but finds their enterprise "Total Failure, Inc." challenged by a college-bound spy and a four-foot-tall girl whom Timmy refuses to acknowledge.

Fresh off her wolverine study in Montana, wildlife biologist Alex Carter lands a job studying a threatened population of polar bears in the Canadian Arctic. Embedded with a small team of Arctic researchers, she tracks the majestic bears by air, following them over vast, snowy terrain, spending days leaning precariously out of a helicopter with a tranquilizer gun, until she can get down on the ice to examine them up close. But as her study progresses,...

It is a time of trouble in the Northern Kingdoms because a group of power-hungry polar bears called Roguers has been snatching cubs from their mothers and killing those who resist; but Svenna is not about to relinquish her two cubs to that fate, so she agrees to go with the Roguers and serve Mystress of the Hands if her cubs, who have special powers, are allowed to stay with her cousin--but nobody is truly safe when a way of life is collapsing around...