The Ice Twins

The Ice Twins (2015) a psychological thriller by S.K. Tremayne, concerns the difficult lives of parents Angus and Sarah Moorcroft, whose twin daughter, Lydia, dies in an accident. One year after her death, they take the other twin, Kirstie, to live on a sparsely inhabited Scottish island near Skye. As they are about to move, Kirstie announces that she is actually Lydia. The revelation triggers the resurgence of the parents’ repressed trauma, torturing them with the background of an approaching winter. The novel draws from tropes and patterns of both past and contemporary thrillers in the genre, using the misty shores of Scotland as its setting and acknowledging important elements of the Scottish literary tradition.

The novel begins with the identical twins’ background. Born on a freezing winter’s day, they astonish their parents with their icy blue eyes and white-blonde hair that resembles snow. Their grandfather gives them the name “the Ice Twins,” admiring them with this dually beautiful and ominous title. Their mother, Sarah, works as a freelance journalist and believes that they constitute a perfect family, having been exposed to plenty of dysfunctional stories during her career. That all changes one afternoon when they visit Sarah’s parents’ house. Lydia, then six, falls from a balcony and dies.

The novel shifts to thirteen months later. Once motivated and optimistic, striving for perfection, Sarah and Angus’s family has transformed into a depressive fugue. The central event of the death cascades into other aspects of their lives. Angus, who works as an architect, hits his boss in a fit of rage and is fired. They can barely make payments on the two mortgages for their house. In an effort to restart, they take their remaining daughter, supposed to be Kirstie, to Torran Island, a hunk of land bestowed to Angus by his deceased grandmother.



Sarah is excited to tell Kirstie about the move, but is met with a sudden outburst, as her daughter demands to know why she keeps calling her Kirstie, explaining that she died. Sarah is shocked to hear that her surviving daughter may have been Lydia all this time. She spirals into a cognitive dissonance over her possible serious misperception about their daughters. However, Angus and Sarah convene and agree that it is Kirstie, who may be lingering in a state of confusion and trauma after losing her twin sister, trying to will her name back into existence.

Angus and Sarah take their daughter to Torran Island, inhabiting the derelict cottage of a former lighthouse keeper. As they make repairs, trying to transform their land into a welcoming place, Kirstie will not stop identifying as Lydia. One night, the family has a dinner party. Their daughter screams, claiming that she has seen her dead twin in the window. In the following days, she continues to reject her parents’ narrative of Kirstie having died in the fall. She begins to claim that Lydia, who remains in her view the really deceased twin, has been coming to the island cottage to play with her. She also announces that Lydia has been with her even after death, arguing that it is impossible to separate them, and employing the pronoun “we,” blurring the line between their identities.

Eventually, Sarah solicits a psychiatrist in Glasgow to make sense of her daughter. He tells her that since their genomes are identical, it is natural for one twin to take over the identity of the other upon her death, regardless of what happens to her actual body. For Sarah, this raises a more philosophical and spiritual question: she wonders whether Kirstie is merely pretending to be Lydia, or whether she has been possessed by her ghost. Mirroring this psychological shift in their understanding of death, the parents begin to perceive mysterious events on the island. Angus claims to witness the twin shadows of the girls outside the house, while one night, Sarah claims to have seen both of the girls at once in her bedroom.



At the novel’s conclusion, the true identity of the surviving twin is ambiguous. Tremayne raises the ontological question of what makes a person unique, coupling it with the problematic concepts of the survivor of chance and the family’s reaction to loss. In the end, Tremayne manages to make the question of identity seem both of utmost importance and arbitrary, reflecting more on the attitudes and psyches of the living characters than the silence and neutrality of the dead.