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 Pole’s 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 predecessor’s 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
forever—and 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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