Recommendation of Paul Light
Review from Amazon customer: This is not my normal fare. It is a spy novel with some very interesting biotech and anthropological themes nicely embedded into a plot that spans about fifty years. It is a tribute to the author's cunning skill at how he succeeds in holding the reader spellbound across three continents in a massive (long) page turning epic. The characters are vivid, unusual and maybe even challenging. The research behind this book is tremendous and I have now learned so much more about Russia, the arctic, and most of all about Siberia. It certainly isn't dull and i was a pleasure to read a novel that had some running jumping and shooting, it wasn't overdone. There was very well written descriptive detail without it being too complex r prosaic. A fabulous read.
Of this novel Philip Pullman wrote that it was the best thriller he had read, four times. And since Lionel Davidson has since died, Pullman is unlikely to read a better one. "The best thriller I've ever read, and I've read plenty. A solidly researched and bone-chilling adventure in a savage setting, with a superb hero."
Blurb: A frozen Siberian hell lost in endless night. The perfect location for an underground Russian research station. It's a place so secret it doesn't officially exist; once there, the scientists are forbidden to leave. But one scientist is desperate to get a message to the outside world. So desperate, he sends a plea across the wilderness to the West in order to summon the one man alive who can achieve the impossible...
Plot summary: A coded message is smuggled out of Russia, a plea for help from a super-secret laboratory deep in the frozen wastes of Siberia. The note is addressed to Johnny Porter, a Canadian Indian of the Gitxsan tribe with a genius for languages and disguises, and reluctantly he is forced to slip across the border on a rescue mission, the consequences of which he little imagines. The detailed picture of life in the Kolyma region and of the native peoples of the Russian Far East (such as the Evenks) and British Columbia (such as the Tsimshian) is impressive.
Like the Amazon review says: "A fabulous read".
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