I am so glad I picked up this book. The attention to detail is amazing, and it is obvious that the author has experienced what he is writing about. As the setting was so well described and the content so interesting I didnt realise until quite near the end that I was slightly confused as to what was really going on and that there were a couple of characters that I really didnt know very well. However, despite the slightly gory ending of one of the characters at the end, this book kept me reading because I wanted to understand what was going on. The ending I think was quite fast, but that may just be because I kept reading until I had finished!
A solid thriller from an author I rate close to Alistair McLean and Douglass Reeman. The plot is not really surprising, but it has a classic elegance of the 1940-1950 noir style with several shady characters chasing a McGuffin across a North Sea storm, a nausea inducing whaling station, the fjords and iced mountains of Norway. There's even the mandatory femme fatale, one I kept picturing as Veronika Lake in one of her less brooding roles. One harrowing skiing epic reminded me of Hammond Innes first book - The Lonely Skier. Straightforward prose, vivid imagery and tight control of plot puts this book in my recommended reading category.
