The novel opens as the famous English explorer Julian Fitzgerald and amateur trekker Norwegian Carl Norland are teetering near death some eighty miles short of their goal: to walk across Antarctica at its broadest point. Norland sends an SOS and an air rescue plane crashes while attempting to land at the site.

The closest people are some 300 miles away located at the Capricorn Research Station. Capricorn is a drilling base commanded by scientist Lauren Burgess who is following her dream to bring samples up from a lake that lies 2000 feet below the surface of the ice. The drilling has been in progress for some time, but the rescue takes priority and she and one of her four-man team trek to the site by snowmobile and rescue the men.

The initial suspense of whether or not Fitzgerald and Norland will be rescued is abated with a cutaway to the Capricorn Base and the introduction of the individuals of the station and their project. Oddly enough, Julian Fitzgerald is in better condition when found than when the SOS was sent.

They return to Lauren’s base and enter the dark time of the year where evacuation is impossible. Thus the second part of the story slowly begins as the diverse personalities settle in for the six-month long haul until daylight. Instead of developing the characters, the author relies upon the functioning of the group in close proximity to showcase each person’s strengths and weaknesses. This technique falls short of demonstrating characters’ incentives, desires, or personalities.

Suspense begins to be created by the growing awareness that one of these characters is mad, and has little to lose in his race for fame and fortune. The base is destroyed by fire, and the second half of the book gains traction in their dramatic flight for survival pitted not only against the extreme weather conditions but also the machinations of the villain who is also escaping.

The descriptions of Antarctica are incredibly detailed and alone make this novel well worth the reading. Offsetting this is the very poor character development, the choppiness of the story and the failure to develop the extraneous subplots. The weakly constructed plot and characters offsets the expressively beautiful, and sometimes cruel terrain and climate, making Black Ice only an average read.

--Thea Davis