Customer Reviews

Dark Winter

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Agatha Christie took ten people off to a remote location for a weekend, and they started to die, one by one. William Dietrich isolates twenty-six people at the South Pole for several months, and guess what? "Ten Little Indians" happens to twenty-six ice- and dark-bound South Pole residents. (There are no penguins at the Pole; they are at the ocean hundreds of miles away.) Jed Lewis is a geologist turned meteorologist assigned as a last minute replacement to the team that will "winter-over" at the Amundsen-Scott Base at the South Pole. When the plane that bought Jed leaves, along with the last of the "summer people", the twenty-six remaining scientists and support staff are stranded-there will be no way in or out over the long, perpetually dark winter. (The very real April, 2001 evacuation of a critically ill doctor from Amundsen-Scott by a heroic small plane flight from McMurdo base emphasizes he isolation of the characters in the book.) Jed is actually a sort of secret agent. After becoming disenchanted with his work with "big oil" in secretly surveying the Alaskan nature reserves for oil deposits, he is looking for a new job. He meets a scientist who is working on global warming and needs data from the South Pole winter; but the technician who was going to winter over and collect data for him has canceled. It also seems that the top scientist at the Pole has found a rock buried deep in the ice. Since there are no rocks at the Pole, this must be a meteorite, but it is not the typical metallic rock. The find must be kept secret, because it could be very valuable-scientifically and commercially. Since Jed is a geologist, he can do the preliminary evaluation over the winter while collecting climate data. Meanwhile, he will have several months to consider his life and his options. In an almost foreseeable fashion, the plot begins to twist and turn when the rock disappears and then its finder is found dead. Clue after clue points toward Jed, who is the new guy and suspicious anyway-why was a geologist sent down to do climate research? There is romance, and there is skulduggery. The story is told well and the reader feels the isolation and fear as everyone seeks to find an easy answer to calm their terrors. Even if many parts of the plot are anticipated, the story is interesting-after all, Agatha Christie was not all that original in her stories, and they are still classics.

Geologist Jed Lewis took a last-minute detour to Antarctica, as a favor to a friend. Seems Amundsen-Scott base's grand old man, astrophysicist Mickey Moss, may have found a Martian meteorite - and if he has, it could well be worth up to five million dollars. With that kind of money at stake, and a secret that can't last five minutes among twenty-six so close-knit administrators and scientists, it isn't long before the rock disappears...and, one by one, so do the crew of Amundsen-Scott. As if the cash incentive of the possible meteorite isn't enough, one of this year's base members is actually an exceptionally dangerous psychopath - who already has more than one murder to his credit.

This is a tightly-written, deeply involving thriller, part murder mystery, part action-adventure, and all survival story. The characters are memorable and well-drawn, no mean feat given the size of the cast. Dietrich is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer for the Seattle Times and a real-life visitor of the famous international Antarctic base, giving his descriptions of living conditions in polar hell a keener edge than mere fiction. The suspense is excellent - though Dietrich could perhaps have made determining the killer's identity more difficult - and the action and the violence hold your attention, throughout.

I've read a great many polar adventure stories, from Alastair Maclean's "Ice Station Zebra" and John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" (The Thing) to more recent entries like Matthew Reilly's "Ice Station" and Preston and Childs' "The Ice Limit," and of the lot, I'd have to rank this with Campbell's famous sci-fi action/adventure tale and "The Ice Limit" as the best-written and most memorable - in fact, Dietrich even pays The Thing an early homage in his gripping (or should that be "chilling"?) novel.

Ultimately, this thoroughly engrossing read even manages to be something of an Antarctic war story - the ultimate "cold war," as it were. Don't hesitate to snap it up. And don't forget your long-johns.

For the 26 men and women who are wintering at the South Pole, they have to survive in possibly the most isolated place on the planet. During winter, the sun won't come up for eight months; they are completely alone to carry on their research. Many of them have done it before, so are not too disturbed at the prospect of being cut-off from the rest of the world, enduring the eight-month night. Until the killings start.

Not long after one of the scientists makes a significant, and possibly very profitable, discovery, members of the Amundsen-Scott Research Base begin to mysteriously disappear before being found dead. Is it an accident, suicide or something far more sinister? Unfortunately, for Jed Lewis, the new arrival on the base, all evidence seems to suggest that he's the murderer. In order to clear his name, he is compelled to find out just who is causing the mayhem.

This book had me wholly engrossed, both with the fascinating detail regarding survival in Antarctica and at the prospect of being cooped up for eight months with a killer. As more and more members of the tiny community are picked off, everyone's fears begin to get manipulated and rationality flies out the window. It's a chilling book in more ways than one.

A well-written and well-thought out narrative of the physical,emotional and scientific challenges of wintering-over in the Antartic. I normally prefer mysteries and this novel certainly fulfilled that requirement as members of the scientific community disappeared or made ghastly (dead) appearances. In the wake of September 11, the author raises some issues about survival and what is important to the human species. The science presented was believable, understandable and fascinating! I will miss these characters...

This is just what we are used to from William Dietrich. Fast paced action, well thought out plot, and plenty of intrigue. I loved the book, storyline, the point he was making, etc. My beef is I bought this for the Kindle and this book contained more errors and typos than any book I have ever seen, particularly the last third (where the editor apparently fell asleep). Some sentences took a magic decoder ring to figure out what was supposed to be there. Someone should really clean this up if Amazon is going to keep selling it.

A group of people are being eliminated by a psychopathic serial killer in Antarctica, without any hope of outside help. This is a very original and a very good novel. The description of this freezing continent, the mood of the characters as they face not only the killer but also the darkness and the cold, the psychological reactions are all expertly written by William Dietrich. A very good read which carries on from the first chapter to the last. Recommended.

William Dietrich is too darn good with his descriptions of life at Amundsen-Scott research station in Antartica. 26 "beakers"(scientific staff) and support personnel are left at the station to winter over for 8 months. Now I am enough claustrophobic that this sounds like my own little version of hell, much less that it's -100 degrees outside and sometimes colder.

Character development was, for the most part, excellent in the book. Good antaganist (and I appreciated the glimpses of backstory to help establish motive). I really liked the views we got of human nature in a closed, hostile environment. I might not have agreed with how all of the stories played out but still thought that "Dark Winter" was an exceptionally well-written thriller.

Great, great descriptions of Antarctica, the station, and the living environs.

This Agatha-Christie-in-Antarctica mystery is one of my very favorite thrillers. Snow-packed in authentic detail, author William Dietrich nicely balances his environmental and scientific grasp on South Pole life with a neatly paced, unbearably tense, character-driven whodunit.

The story: Twenty-six scientists and support staffers are stuck at an international research station at the South Pole for "dark winter" -- six months without sunlight, a time in which no planes can arrive. That leaves the people left behind to police themselves -- and the ability to which they can do that depends in large part on strength of individual character and pressure points of human weakness. Or madness.

Into this vacuum-sealed environment, on the last plane in, arrives young Jed Lewis. Ostensibly a meteorologist, he's actually there to discreetly spy on his fellow social misfits. Instantly, the presence of the "fingie" is resented by some -- and used by others as cover for their own misdeeds. When Dr. Mickey Moss, the station's star scientist, disappears and is found dead among reports that he had found a valuable meteorite deep in the ice under the Pole, fear and suspicion sweep over the survivors -- and center on Lewis.

The bodies continue to pile up, and each grisly discovery seems calculated to make Lewis look even more guilty. Is he? Events culminate in a bloody, frenetic series of events that threaten to destroy the entire station and kill off those who are left -- unless those who harbor secret doubts about Lewis' guilt act in time.

Dietrich, a longtime reporter for The Seattle Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for his science and environmental reporting, cradles his narrative in a soothing, surprisingly compelling blanket of interesting detail about the unique nature of life at the South Pole. He never overdoes the science, however, and keeps just about every bit of it germane to the plot.

The revelation here is the rich bits of character detail. Dietrich does a fine job of developing the characters of about two-thirds of the "winter-overs"-- everybody's psychologically complex, everybody's got a past, everybody contributes to the currents of tension between one another. Some of it is alpha-male conflict, some of it is male-female percolation, some of it is professional jealousy. And some can't help but exploit those to create explosions out of malicious amusement -- or just plain malice. There are few one-dimensional characters here, and following them is like following the high-priced stars in an Irwin Allen disaster movie -- you're dying to know who isn't going to make it, and you're hoping like hell it isn't somebody you've come to care about.

Some reviews, notably a slash-and-burn in Publishers Weekly, have taken Dietrich to task for by-the-numbers mystery craftsmanship that supposedly drained "Dark Winter" of suspense and surprises. I can't say I agree. It is true that Dietrich hints pretty strongly at the mastermind behind the mischief and murders by the halfway point, but the rest of the story is so skillfully told that one can't be sure whether or not this tipped hand is just another piece of misdirection. And, of course, the REAL suspense is just as much in who lives and who dies.

I'm a pretty tough judge of mysteries and thrillers, dinging them often for implausible plotting, poor characterizations, pallid settings and perfunctory prose. But "Dark Winter" passed all these tests for me. The worst I can say about it is that an italicized flashback narrative sprinkled throughout the book is tediously slow. But that's a minor quibble in an otherwise ambitious, airtight, awesomely tension-filled tale.

This highly entertaining mystery novel is set at Admunson-Scott research base at the South Pole. A team of researchers and support crew are preparing to spend the next eight months "wintering over" at the base, where they'll be completely cut off from the outside world (except for email), and completely on their own. The temperature can get down to minus 110 degrees, which means no planes can fly in, and nobody can be outside for more than a few minutes without risking life or limb. Once you're in the station and the last plane has left, you're stuck there with no options for escape for eight frozen-solid months. Most of the station's winter staff have been there before and know each other well. But there are two newcomers this year as well: Jed Lewis, a geologist who has been hired to study the weather, and Bob Norse, a psychologist there to monitor the emotions of the others, as part of a space-related study to see how people cope when they are thrust into a stressful, isolated, and small environment.

At first, everything is pretty exciting for Jed, until he finds out he's been hired for an ulterior reason -- the main scientist on the base, an old-timer named Mickey Moss, didn't actually bring a geologist out to study the weather after all. Go figure. Nope, instead, he brought Jed to the South Pole to analyze a rock he's found -- a rock he thinks is from Mars, something that would make it worth over five million dollars. But before Jed even has a chance to really examine it, the rock goes missing. And then Moss is found murdered. Pretty soon, the researchers and staff find themselves being picked off one by one, with one body found with an anonymous note implying that the killer is after the missing rock, and will keep killing until whoever stole it hands it over. Everybody suspects Jed -- after all, he's the newbie and he was the only one who really knew how valuable the rock would be. Then again, there's also the mechanic with an extremely large, and violent, chip on his shoulder. And, frankly, I'm finding that psychologist guy a little bit shady, as well, though I can't really put my finger on just why. Who is killing off the staff at Admundson-Scott? And how can the others stop the murderer when they have no weapons, no crime-fighting skills, no contact with the outside world, no means of escape, and no locks on any of their doors?

Man, this was just a really exciting and thoroughly entertaining novel. I can't remember the last time I found a book so gripping it kept me awake for hours and hours past my bedtime -- but that's exactly what this book did. When I got to the last third, I couldn't go to bed until I was done. I love it when that happens (that is, until the next morning, when I'm utterly exhausted!). Highly, highly recommended, and I can't wait to read more by this author soon!

BORING- don't waste your time. I read "Blood of the Reich" by the same author and liked it very much.