Ice Reich - Softcover

Dietrich, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0446607444 ISBN 13: 9780446607445

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2000

Synopsis

In 1938, Bush pilot Owen Hart is recruited by Germany's fanatical new government to play a crucial role in a top-secret expedition to Antarctica. But, beneath the ice, a deadly discovery awaits and the fate of the world hangs in balance.

About this title

About the Author:

Dietrich was born in 1951 and grew up in Tacoma, WA. A journalism graduate of Western Washington University, he has spent most of his life in the Pacific Northwest, with briefer sojourns in Washington, D.C., and Boston. He spent a year at Harvard University at the Nieman fellowship program for journalists, was a fellow at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, and has won numerous journalism awards. He is married, has two college-age daughters, and lives in Anacortes, WA.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Rousing, Indiana Jones - style debut thriller with scheming Nazis, hair-raising escapes, sweeping scenery, and romance in a volcanic cave. Seattle Times journalist Dietrich (Northwest Passage, 1995, etc.), who won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Exxon Valdez disaster, goes to the last place left on earth for a WWII-era adventure: Antarctica, where, Dietrich adds in an afterword, Hermann G"ring actually sent a group of German explorers in 1938. In Dietrich's fictional account, the Germans take with them American flyboy Owen Hart, whose previous attempt to fly across the South Pole ended in a humiliating failure. Owen, whom we first meet in Alaska after he crashes his plane, knows nothing of the Third Reich's dark side. Eager for adventure, he goes to Berlin, where he meets G"ring, plays with G"ring's electric train set, and falls for the beautiful and brainy Garbo-ish biologist, Greta Heinz. Alas, Greta seems to be pledged to the expedition's commander, the compulsively Hitler-hailing SS Major Jurgen Drexler. Following an uneventful voyage to a continent Dietrich likens to a ``dream that stung,'' the ship is crippled after ramming an ice pack during an impromptu battle with a Norwegian whaler. The ship ties up for repairs at an uncharted volcanic island, where Owen encounters the creepy ruin of a Norwegian ship whose crew has been killed by a hideous infectious disease. Owen and Greta explore the island, discovering the disease's antidote just as the Germans begin to become infected. After a tryst in a slime-filled cave, Owen and Greta are separated - she fleeing with Drexler, he forced to return with a bunch of suspicious Norwegians. The story then moves to the closing days of WWII, with Greta and Owen (now reunited) racing back to the deadly island to stop Drexler from using the disease against the Allies. A merry, melodramatic patchwork of adventure films that, when it isn't evoking predictable cinematic thrills, rivals the page-turners of Alistair MacLean. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0446607444
• ISBN 13: 9780446607445
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448