Oldies But Goodies
{Put This One on Your TBR List}
Book Review: The Ice
Limit and Beyond the Ice Limit by
Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
by Karen S. Wiesner
Be aware that there may be spoilers in this review.
Before collaborating authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child conceived of the character Gideon Crew in 2011, there was a single-title, standalone book called The Ice Limit, published in 2000. In this book, a massive meteorite, maybe the largest ever discovered, is found near an island on Cape Horn, part of West Antarctic claimed by Chile. A billionaire, Palmer Lloyd, wants it for his rare and exotic archaeological artifact museum. To that end, he hires Effective Engineering Solutions, Inc., a not quite legal, "problem solving" firm headed by Eli Glinn, who eventually hires Gideon Crew first a freelancer and then full-time in the Gideon Crew Series. EES is tasked with recovering and transporting the meteorite, traveling undercover in what appears to be a rusty freighter to steal it from Chile. Eventually, it's discovered that this meteorite is in the range of 25,000 tons (more than double the weight that it was initially anticipated) and that it must have come from outside the solar system. And it may not be at all what they originally thought it was.
The cast of characters involved in this harrowing endeavor were some of the most interesting I've encountered in a technothriller where plot tends to be so prominent, external conflict all but overshadows those populating the world the action takes place, so that deep internal conflicts may be neglected entirely. That was not the case here, although there were simply too many characters to name in this short review. Suffice it to say that nearly all of them played decently-developed roles in the events within this book.
As long as this story was (464 pages in the hardcover), reading it was so compulsive, it didn't feel anywhere near its size. I binge-read it not long after it was first published, unable to put it down over the course of a matter of days. That said, I was devastated when I reached the end because it felt like the story was far from finished. The cliffhanger it ended on was frustrating because, at the time this book was published, there was no sequel in sight. Apparently, I wasn't the only one who felt disgruntled. While I didn't realize it at the time I read The Ice Limit, the authors posted a number of fictional newspaper and magazine articles as kind of an epilogue to the story to provide more closure. Naturally, these did nothing for me, since I didn't know they existed, but for years I felt locked into the disappointment of how the book ended. The authors moved on to other books, other series, but somehow they circled back arou
nd to this story--this time within a series they'd begun featuring Gideon Crew, who'd been hired by the EES Corporation in The Ice Limit. Beyond the Ice Limit became Book 4 in that series, published in 2016. Some websites include The Ice Limit as the prequel to that series, though Gideon Crew wasn't really in the original book.
In the sequel, the seed of an alien lifeform that had started sprouting thanks to the endeavors of the retrieval crew at the end of The Ice Limit has become a massive structure that's destroying the Earth. Gideon Crew (a master thief and nuclear physicist) is hired to take down this unnatural enemy before that happens. He's promised that this will be the last project before EES is permanently closed, however I see a new book, The Pharaoh Key, was published for that series in 2018 so promise obviously broken.
While I enjoyed this story immensely, my attempts to read the other Gideon Crew novels didn't go far, maybe in part because I attempted to read them out of order. Whatever the reason, I didn't feel a draw toward the stories or the characters in the one other book in that series I tried to read, though Gideon Crew is much better fleshed out than a lot of action thriller protagonists are. I may attempt to read that series again in the future. In any case, Beyond the Ice Limit is just as exciting and page-turning as its predecessor. I couldn't put it down within the couple days it took to devour it anymore this time than I'd been able to last time.
Something I love to see as a reader and an author is how the authors
have created a shared world connecting many of their novels that cross between
their series or standalone novels. For The
Ice Limit, at least a few characters moved
into the Gideon Crew Series with the sequel Beyond
the Ice Limit. Bill Smithback, Jr., a reporter also did that in the
Pendergast and Nora Kelly series'. Additionally, in the third Pendergast book, The Cabinet of Curiosities, Palmer Lloyd's
museum proposal is mentioned. In Dance of
Death and the sequel The Book of the
Dead, Eli Glinn appears as a supporting character.
The Ice Limit and Beyond the Ice Limit are good, old-fashioned horror fests with all the hair-raising developments and excitement you want in a top-notch thriller. I must add that, within a Pendergast novel, Dance of Death, the sixth in that series, a reference is made to a third book for The Ice Limit with what they call there Ice Limit III: Return to Cape Horn. Here's to hoping another sequel is on the way eventually!
Next week, I'll review another Oldie But Goodie you might find worth another read, too.
Karen Wiesner is an
award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.
Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/
and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog
Find out more about her books
and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor
Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/
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