Whiteout - Hardcover

Follett, Ken

3.65

38,543 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0333908414 ISBN 13: 9780333908419

Publisher: Pan MacMillan, 2004

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Jealousies, distrust, and hidden rivalries uncover dark secrets, then a dozen vials of a deadly virus go missing.

As a blizzard whips out of the north on Christmas Eve, several people converge on a remote family house. Stanley Oxenford, director of a pharmaceutical research company, has everything riding on a drug he is developing to fight a lethal virus. Several others are interested in his success too: his children, at home for Christmas with their offspring, have their eyes on the money he will make; Toni Gallo, head of his security team and recently forced to resign from the police, is betting her career on keeping it safe; an ambitious local television reporter sniffs a story, even if he has to bend the facts to tell it; and a violent trio of thugs is on their way to steal it, with a client already waiting.

As the storm worsens and the group is laid under siege by the elements, the emotional sparks crackle and dark secrets are uncovered threaten to drive Stanley and his family apart for ever.

Filled with startling twists, Whiteout is the ultimate knife-edge drama from an international bestselling author who is in a class by himself.

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About the Author:

Ken Follett was only twenty-seven when he wrote the award-winning novel EYE OF THE NEEDLE, which became an international bestseller. He has since written sixteen equally successful novels including, most recently, HORNET FLIGHT. He is also author of the non-fiction bestseller ON WINGS OF EAGLES. He lives with his family in London and Hertfordshire.

From Publishers Weekly:

Bestseller Follett sets his sights on biological terrorism, pumping old-school adrenaline into this new breed of thriller. Ex-policewoman Antonia "Toni" Gallo, head of security at a boutique pharmaceuticals company, has discovered that two doses of an experimental drug—developed as a potential cure for the deadly Madoba-2 virus—have vanished from her top-secret laboratory. This mystery is a precursor to a more serious crime being planned by Kit Oxenford, the gambling-addicted son of the company's founder, Stanley Oxenford. Kit, deeply in debt to mobster Harry Mac, sees a raid on his father's lab as a chance to score enough money to disappear and start anew in another country. Some characters are a bit familiar—the pesky, unprincipled journalist; the imbecilic police detective—but others, the mobster's psychopathic daughter in particular, show idiosyncratic originality. After a long buildup, the burglary is set in motion, and Kit's best-laid plans begin to fall apart. Eventually, good guys and bad guys end up at the Oxenford family estate, trapped in the house by a fierce snowstorm as they battle one another over the material stolen from the laboratory. A romance between the recently widowed Stanley and Toni and the unexpected addition of Toni's comically addled mother thicken the plot as Follett's agonizingly protracted, nail-biter ending drags readers to the very edge of their seats and holds them captive until the last villain is satisfactorily dispatched.
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