The Ice Limit

It's only been about a week since I read this book, but I'm already hazy on the details, so this will be vague.

Basically, this super-rich guy hires an engineering firm with a perfect record of doing the "impossible" to extract a meteorite from the ground of a Chilean island off of Cape Horn. In the wintertime. Without Chile's government officials finding out about it. Of course things go wrong.

This was an odd mixture of a book that I couldn't put down and a book that felt like it was creeping along. I could have done without a lot of the day-to-day engineering feats they pulled off. They didn't all add to the story's plot.

I was pretty conflicted about who the bad guys and good guys were. This isn't a very black-and-white book.

I saw where it was going. Overall, I think anyone who reads the back cover has a good idea what's going to happen. But there's a sudden twist in the very last sentence, and I even saw that coming from a little way out. Maybe because I've read both Bill Bryson's [book: A Short History of Nearly Everything] and Dan Brown's [book:Deception Point] recently. In fairness, without those, I would have been clueless and maybe a little more weirded out.

And that brings up the fact that I couldn't help comparing this book with Deception Point. The plots weren't all that similar, but they do both involve unique meteorites. I would recommend Deception Point instead of this one. I read it much more quickly, heavy foreshadowing and all, and just overall enjoyed it more.

This book wasn't bad, it just wasn't gread. I've only read one other Preston/Child book, [book:Thunderhead], and I would recommend it instead of this one too. I enjoyed it. I will keep reading these guys, though. ( )

A non-Pendergast suspense novel by the team of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, as the 7th-richest man in the world, Palmer Lloyd, organizes an expedition to the south coast of Chile to retrieve for his new museum in New York the largest meteorite ever discovered. At 25,000 tons, it would be the heaviest object ever moved by man. But things begin to go wrong as the meteorite displays unexpected properties, and is apparently composed of an unknown element from uncharted areas of the periodic table. It reacts with electrical violence to human touch, and has aroused the interest of a Chilean military officer who suspects that this American expedition is not here to mine gold, as put forth to the authorities. It's a decent story of suspense and technological achievement, only marred by a disappointing conclusion that leaves too many unanswered questions, among them being, how was Palmer Lloyd able to touch the meteorite without consequence? The final paragraph, however, is a nifty little twist that puts the meteorite in a wholly new light that I did not see coming. ( )

Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

I listened to an abridged version of this book; it's definitely not Preston & Child's finest work - but that might have been mainly due to the fact that it was abridged. ( )