Welcome to hell frozen over. That's the Amundsen-Scott South Pole base, where Hallie Leland steps off a cargo plane to meet drunken Polie staff, happy because they can fly out. She's wearing seven layers of clothing, getting altitude sickness, the wind-chill brings the temperature to a hundred degrees below zero. The research station is on stilts to prevent the drifting snow from covering it and everyone in the stinking facility catches colds. Hallie's a scientist, here to do technical ice diving, but she's barely arrived when a woman bleeds to death in the canteen.
In FROZEN SOLID Hallie's predecessor died at the Pole and she gets a briefing on the many hazards of life in this remote place. But she didn't expect to discover proof on a hidden camera that her predecessor had been murdered. And now she doesn't know who she can trust, because the murderer may still be on the base. A world away, in teeming India, men plot a global epidemic that will reduce the population to what they consider sustainable levels. And where better to try it out than a sealed, isolated ice station?
This well written thriller exposes the unpleasant reality of Antarctica - normal people don't want to spend a year in a frozen, dark Alcatraz, we're told. There's little ventilation and showers are two minutes a week. Strangely a scientist claims that people can get any illegal drugs they want. The station director is a Deputy Marshal but there is no other law enforcement. Having read a journalist's recent account of an Antarctic coastal research station, The Ferocious Summer I found the Pole presented here came off very badly by comparison.
There's plenty of action and tension, and James Tabor has written well of the hazards of ice climbing, avalanches, exposure and ice diving into a cryopeg - saline lake under ice - in this extreme environment. We're told that a litter made of fibreglass shattered in the cold; why isn't search and rescue equipment made of carbon-fibre? The story keeps us learning and wondering. One quibble; Tabor says that Antarctica is a frozen block of sea ice, where in fact it is ice sitting on rock, a continent. FROZEN SOLID is a good read but does have unpleasant moments as people die suddenly, and some of them are people we've come to like. Fans of thrillers and conspiracy theories won't be able to read this quickly enough.
The South Poleβs Amundsen Scott Research Station is like an
outpost on Mars. Winter temperatures average 100 degrees
below zero; week-long hurricane-force storms rage; for
eight months at a time the station is shrouded in darkness.
Under the stress, bodies suffer and minds twist. Panic,
paranoia, and hostility prevail.
When a South Pole scientist dies mysteriously, CDC
microbiologist Hallie Leland arrives to complete crucial
research. Before she can begin, three more women
inexplicably die. As failing communications and plunging
temperatures cut the station off from the outside world,
terror rises and tensions soar. Amidst it all, Hallie must
crack the mystery of her predecessorβs death.
In Washington, D.C., government agency director Don Barnard
and enigmatic operative Wil Bowman detect troubling signs
of shadowy behavior at the South Pole and realize that
Hallie is at the heart of it. Unless Barnard and Bowman can
track down the mastermind, a horrifying act of global
terror, launched from the station, will change the planet
foreverβand Hallie herself will be the unwitting instrument
of destruction.
As the Antarctic winter sweeps in, severing contact with
the outside world, Hallie must trust no one, fear everyone,
and fight to keep the frigid prison from becoming her
frozen grave.
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