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.