He's great again...awesome so glad there was a sequel

A satisfying, if predictable*, conclusion to The Ice Limit and the best Gideon installment so far. Even though this series is fast-paced and trite, it's also a great "fluffy" thriller when you need a quick fix.

*

Spoiler

If you've seen Alien, you can see this coming a mile away, especially if you made the Alien connection with Ice Limit as I did.

Good book, a solid conclusion to ice limit. Not as awesome as ice limit itself or as it could have been but I still liked it. The idea of a Alien-plant spreading his seeds through the universe is cool, but I would have liked a little more information over it. Also its nature could have been a little more alien.

A pretty decent premise for a thriller, but this seemed like it delved less into some fairly interesting characters (Glinn, Gideon, McFarlane). I think that their Pendergast series is far superior both in writing and in complexity of plots. Not a bad ending to the Ice Limit saga, but seemed a bit too wrapped up in too short a time with too simplistic an ending.

Too many technical details - felt like the authors were trying to head off at the pass any potential cries that the plot was too fantastical to be believable.

Inferior sequel to a middling technothriller, this time with elements reminiscent of 70s and 80s sci-fi/horror movies. Surviving characters from the first book are treated rather poorly; one is apparently confined to a straitjacket 24/7 to avoid committing suicide, a remarkably shortsighted mental health strategy. Another is now a hobo? A third was critically injured and disabled at the end of the first novel but is now perfectly fine because ... reasons.

Some of these broken men (only men, because the female characters in the first book all died) join a new character, the petulant, horny, shockingly unprofessional nuclear weapons expert (?) Gideon Crew, to sneak down to the Antarctic Ocean in a boat to nuke an alien underwater tree. Couldn't the US government better handle this grave existential crisis to Earth? Nope, because ... reasons. Even after the crew's lack of professionalism and terrible decision-making results in their mission teetering on the brink of failure, nobody thinks to pick up the phone and call for backup.

After stacking the odds against our protagonists (Brain worms! Zombies! Mutiny! Beatles references!), the last chapters resolve with a shrug and a vague waving of a hand, as if the authors just got bored with plotting their way through the climax. An afterword from the authors state that they had not planned to pen a sequel, but they received too many demands from fans to ignore. They should have left it alone.

Readers of Preston and Child will find many familiar features. Unfortunately, I feel like the familiar features are their more formulaic ones, and this was lacking the extra "something else" to make this book unique. Perhaps it would be more fair to say that the unique parts of this book were not very interesting to me.

This book reminds me of [b:The Andromeda Strain|7670|The Andromeda Strain|Michael Crichton|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388889327s/7670.jpg|997271]. That's not really a good thing. I don't really like the "alien infection" plot line. Also, like the Andromeda Strain, this book ends very abruptly with a fairly unsatisfying resolution that renders most of the previous plot development irrelevant.

I've read enough good Preston and Child books that this won't be my last, but this was a disappointing sequel since [b:The Ice Limit|136642|The Ice Limit (Ice Limit #1)|Douglas Preston|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1172082459s/136642.jpg|6909481] is my favorite book by these authors.