Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Not Your Usual Trip to South America
The not-so-incredible billionaire wants the largest meteorite ever found transported from an island off Tierra del Fuego to his state of the art natural history museum in New York. The first thing you have to wrap your mind around is the incredible estimated weight (10,000 tons) of the meteorite. The second is the proximity of Tierra del Fuego to Antarctica. I was grateful for the map, because I had difficulty grasping the idea that where they were going is very cold indeed!Preston and Child deliver on this thriller. The characters are three dimensional, particularly the billionaire. The engineering feats are well written for the laymen. The storm at sea is stupendous; you have a true feeling of doom at your doorstep. However, I subtracted two stars. The first because the book is a slow starter. It took 150 pages to set up the story. The second star is withheld because of the ending, which is reminiscent of a '50's horror movie. I wanted to say 'oh puh-leeze!' These two faults are not a major deterrent; it's 60% fine entertainment.
Rating: - Non-stop suspense
Lots of ice and plenty of farfetched suspense make for perfect summer escapism with Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's latest adventure thriller.The book opens with a bang as a lone scientist on a desolate island just north of Antarctica makes the discovery of a lifetime, which promptly incinerates him. Cut to the seventh richest man in the world, American businessman Palmer Lloyd, who throws his financial weight around at a Christie's auction, much to the humbled participants' disgust and admiration, then flies off to the Kalahari to buy a prominent meteorite hunter. Lloyd is building the world's greatest natural history museum and the meteorite hunter, Sam McFarlane, is going to help him acquire his centerpiece - the world's largest meteorite - found by Sam's former partner on that Chilean Antarctic island. Lloyd also acquires an engineer to plan the expedition, a humorless perfectionist who prides himself on his flawless success record. Eli Glinn plans for every contingency, human nature included. The party sets out on a state-of-the-art tanker, disguised as a rustbucket on an ore mining job. Like Glinn and McFarlane, its dignified female captain has been made wiser by a career-blighting error. The expedition attracts the attention of a bitter and suspicious Chilean destroyer captain, whose powerlessness is matched by his tenacity. And then Glinn, who thinks of everything, allows Sam to bury his former partner's body without inspecting it. Uh oh. But the initial digging of the meteorite goes off without a hitch. Palmer Lloyd jumps down on the surprisingly red rock and presses his cheek to it without ill effect. Still, the thing is strange. Its rich, ruby color is mesmerizing, its weight is mind-boggling and it's so hard it burns out a big diamondhead drill without giving up a fragment of itself. Its origins and properties stir up Sam's old obsession - interstellar meteorites. All previous meteorites have come from our own solar system and the possibility of an interstellar rock is a statistical impossibility, or so the scientists say. And soon the problems begin. Though Glinn plans for everything, the rock (the heaviest object ever moved by humans) seems to have ideas of its own. With increasing momentum, several suplots, budding romances, raging storms and sinsiter mysteries clash, collide and hurtle towards an explosive climax among the deadly ice islands of the Ice Limit surrounding Antarctica. The characters are more fleshed out than in previous books and the settings - the high-tech tanker, the forbidding island, the stormy sea - are well done. There are a few holes in the plot (no ship would be racing full speed through 100-foot seas, for one) but who cares? Mystery and suspense are what we are looking for and Preston and Childs ("Riptide," "The Relic," "Thunderhead") deliver.
Rating: - Formulaic, but a tried and true formula
At this point, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have refined their formula for writing bestsellers: (1) an sometimes eccentric, usually obsessive person (2) wants to achieve some goal (3) which requires that a team of highly skilled professionals (4) equipped with super high-tech toys (5) and brimming with (over)confidence (6) go into the wild and face Mother Nature, one another, and Big Science, (7) and although every contingency should be planned for, (8) things go wrong."Mount Dragon" was about microbiologists dealing with a killer virus, "Riptide" was about treasure hunters, "Thunderhead" was about archeaologists, and "The Ice Limit" is about engineers and a geologist on a meteor hunting expedition. Preston and Child actually care enough about the characters to imbue them with more characterization than usual for thrillers, although the breakdown in one of the central characters isn't hard to predict. There's some science of meteorites, a naval skirmish, something of a love affair, and a lot about engineering. The gore level is relatively low, although there are a number of deaths. Like "Riptide," there is a mystery buried within the adventure story, and the reader is kept guessing to the last page. Among their books, I would rate "The Ice Limit" on a par with "Riptide," just below "Mount Dragon," and above "Thunderhead" and "Reliquary."
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