Icebound
Dean Koontz

A secret Arctic experiment becomes a frozen nightmare when a team of scientists are set adrift on an iceberg with a murderer in their midst and a massive explosive charge only hours away from detonation.

This book was originally released under a different title and under a pseudonym. The author decided to re-work the book and give it a re-release with a new name and his name attached to it. He probably shouldn't have bothered. If this is the re-work, I really don't want to see what the original is like and it's obvious why he used a pen name for the other book.

This is not one of Koontz's best works. Granted, it's a re-work of one of his earlier novels, but it's still not even close to his usual work. The characters are forgettable, so much so that you can barely tell them apart, and while the situation is suspenseful, you just don't care about the characters (with the possible exception of the Russian submarine captain, who is the only well rounded character of the bunch) enough to care what happens to them.

The main group of characters are stuck on a piece of an iceberg that had broken off and was swept off in a bad winter storm. There are explosives set to go off and midnight and their only hope for a way off is a Russian submarine. They also have someone in their midst who wishes to kill one of their group. Not a bad plot idea, but the whole thing just fell flat.

Unlike most Koontz novels, this was one that I could easily put down. I would not recommend it, unless you really want to see just how far the author has come in his career.

My rating: Three out of five snails.