The Bottom Line: If you want a unique premise, read away, but be prepared to accept the unbelievable as commonplace.
Hot as Ice. It's an interesting title. It brings to mind a whole host of interesting images, doesn't it? How does one have hot ice? Is it like dry ice, that steams and smokes, but isn't wet? Wouldn't hot ice melt? What exactly does the author mean?
In this case, Merline Lovelace means the hero of her novel, Charlie Stone, nicknamed the Iceman. Major Stone, once a test pilot for the Air Force, went down over the Siberian wilderness while flying a U2 on a reconaissance mission, some forty-five years ago.
You read that right, forty-five years. But wait, it gets better.
At an oceanographic station in Point Barrow, Alaska, in the modern day, Major Stone's watery -- or shall I say icy -- tomb is disturbed by a submarine surfacing to deliver supplies and company to the isolated scientists there. It's a shock, needless to say, to be staring through five feet of ice at a human being, but the scientists waste no time.
Soon, much like the frozen neanderthal and wooly mammoth of recent history, a team has been dispatched to Alaska to take up the task of thawing out and hopefully reviving this man. Assigned to the team is Diana Remington, a research biologist for a private institution, and secretly a member of one of the nation's most protected agencies, OMEGA. Her code name is Artemis, like the goddess of the hunt.
The procedure to wake Charlie up is successful. Diana becomes his guardian and his companion. She's the one who explains the forty-five year leap in time. Of course Charlie is suspicious of her. Of course he suspects her of being part of a Communist brain-washing program, but eventually her persistence and good-looks win him over to her side. And later, after they've romped through the bedsheets a few times, she wins enough of his trust for him to offer his theory on why the U2 went down: It wasn't shot down. The high-altitude suit he was wearing malfunctioned and he blacked out. There must be a conspiracy behind it.
At some point in all of this set up, I think my willing suspension of disbelief got blown out of the water. As stated, the premise is unique, the characters are set up to have one heck of a hurdle to get over, and the 'villain' isn't the sort of cocky, over-confident gun-wielding maniac you'd expect.
But there are just too many leaps and bounds that are taken at face value and explained away, not to mention easily resolved. Diana's OMEGA team can apparently do anything, and do it with blinding speed. She has contacts everywhere, and nothing appears to be a true obstacle. When there is an error in the results of a still-unconscious Charlie's tests, Diana's the one to find them, -and- to figure out that someone else doesn't want the error found. Clever lady.
Perhaps I felt detached from the book because I haven't read the rest of the series. Perhaps Ms. Lovelace's writing style doesn't appeal to me. (I confess, this was the first of her books I've read.) Then again, maybe the story arcs really are over the top, and the characters flat and unengaging. Whatever the case, I feel like I missed out on the excitement of anything that could be 'Hot as Ice'.
I leave it to you to agree or disagree.
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