Polar ice seems to be concentrating on the minds of overseas publishers — that, and beautiful women whose brilliance, not their vulnerability, puts them in danger’s way.
Deception Point by Dan Brown (Corgi) is a case in point. Rachel Sexton is a gister, which is apparently a person who distills the gist, or sense, of intelligence reports, generally technological, for the president of the United States. She is sent to the Arctic to distill the sense of a newly discovered meteorite that has been buried in the ice for 300 years and is showing astounding properties. One by one, scientists who have been working on it start turning up dead, targets of a shadowy no-holds-barred government agency that deploys terrifying technology. Sexton works for a government intelligence agency nobody’s ever heard of. The author of this fascinating trip into Tom Clancy territory claims that both organisations are real and the technologies exist. Be very afraid.
In Black Ice by Matt Dickinson (Hutchinson), we’ve got a brilliant female scientist gone to rescue a couple of explorers stranded on the Antarctic ice cap. This time it’s a lake under the ice that shows astounding properties, but basically the book is not, like Deception Point, about technology, politics and science, but about the characters — specifically, a famous, ruthless explorer — and their often tedious struggle for survival.
Suppose by popping the odd pill you could live an extra 30 years — would that be a discovery worth killing for if you were, say, in a business dependent on people dying at a reasonable age? In Expiry Date by David Michie (Little, Brown) just such a drug is being developed by brilliant, beautiful scientist Dr Lorna Reid. The author is a former public relations officer and much of the book is about spin and the stock market — just as interesting as gene therapy and somewhat easier to understand.
The protagonist of Tarmac by Lynne Heitman (Little, Brown) is neither beautiful nor brilliant — just a hard-working woman in the man’s world of airports, illegal drugs and money-laundering. Alex Shanahan was an airport manager in her last book, and she’s about to be one again when a friend is killed in Miami and she flies down to find out why. What she finds is likely to keep the reader off airplanes for quite a while.
Books about Miami are often entertaining in their evocation of tropical sleaze; this one has extra appeal as much of it is set in the air-conditioned, claustrophobic airport travellers have learned to detest.