From Publishers Weekly
The terrifically quirky start of a speed-read action adventure in exotic locales with fascinating scientific facts dips too soon into breathless romance to achieve a clear voice. The result: a cinematically layered novel with an identity crisis. Bush pilot Owen Hart, an early failed Antarctic expedition member, is recruited by German diplomat Otto Kohl as pilot/consultant for a prewar 1938 Nazi expedition (sponsored by Goring himself) to Antarctica in search of the natural resources needed for the war effort. Hart falls for SS officer Jurgen Drexler's girlfriend, biologist Greta Heinz, and the dramatic potential of a trip on an air carrier, facing down Norwegian whalers amid an iceberg-bobbing sea, is undermined by the adolescent antics that he and Jurgen perform for Greta's benefit. The discovery of a deadly plague bacterium and a nearby organism with antibiotic effects leads to Hart's separation from the Nazis and his capture and forced return to the island with Jurgen and Greta near the war's end to retrieve the plague germ as a last-ditch super weapon to save the Reich. With Hart's smarts, Greta's pluck and the help of Antarctica's denizens, they strive to outwit a submarine full of stormtroopers in the desperate finale. Dietrich won a Pulitzer for his science writing on the Exxon Valdez episode; any prize for his fiction, however, are still on ice. Audio rights to Time Warner.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Rousing, Indiana Jones - style debut thriller with scheming Nazis, hair-raising escapes, sweeping scenery, and romance in a volcanic cave. Seattle Times journalist Dietrich (Northwest Passage, 1995, etc.), who won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Exxon Valdez disaster, goes to the last place left on earth for a WWII-era adventure: Antarctica, where, Dietrich adds in an afterword, Hermann G"ring actually sent a group of German explorers in 1938. In Dietrich's fictional account, the Germans take with them American flyboy Owen Hart, whose previous attempt to fly across the South Pole ended in a humiliating failure. Owen, whom we first meet in Alaska after he crashes his plane, knows nothing of the Third Reich's dark side. Eager for adventure, he goes to Berlin, where he meets G"ring, plays with G"ring's electric train set, and falls for the beautiful and brainy Garbo-ish biologist, Greta Heinz. Alas, Greta seems to be pledged to the expedition's commander, the compulsively Hitler-hailing SS Major Jurgen Drexler. Following an uneventful voyage to a continent Dietrich likens to a ``dream that stung,'' the ship is crippled after ramming an ice pack during an impromptu battle with a Norwegian whaler. The ship ties up for repairs at an uncharted volcanic island, where Owen encounters the creepy ruin of a Norwegian ship whose crew has been killed by a hideous infectious disease. Owen and Greta explore the island, discovering the disease's antidote just as the Germans begin to become infected. After a tryst in a slime-filled cave, Owen and Greta are separated - she fleeing with Drexler, he forced to return with a bunch of suspicious Norwegians. The story then moves to the closing days of WWII, with Greta and Owen (now reunited) racing back to the deadly island to stop Drexler from using the disease against the Allies. A merry, melodramatic patchwork of adventure films that, when it isn't evoking predictable cinematic thrills, rivals the page-turners of Alistair MacLean. --
Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
