Beyond the Ice Limit by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Gideon Crew #4

That thing is growing again. We must destroy it. The time to act is now…
With these words begins Gideon Crew’s latest, most dangerous, most high-stakes assignment yet. Failure will mean nothing short of the end of humankind on earth.
Five years ago, the mysterious and inscrutable head of Effective Engineering Solutions, Eli Glinn, led a mission to recover a gigantic meteorite–the largest ever discovered–from a remote island off the coast of South America. The mission ended in disaster when their ship, the Rolvaag, foundered in a vicious storm in the Antarctic waters and broke apart, sinking-along with its unique cargo-to the ocean floor. One hundred and eight crew members perished, and Eli Glinn was left paralyzed.

But this was not all. The tragedy revealed something truly terrifying: the meteorite they tried to retrieve was not, in fact, simply a rock. Instead, it was a complex organism from the deep reaches of space.

Now, that organism has implanted itself in the sea bed two miles below the surface-and it is growing. If it is not destroyed, the planet will be doomed. There is only one hope: for Glinn and his team to annihilate it, a task which requires Gideon’s expertise with nuclear weapons. But as Gideon and his colleagues soon discover, the “meteorite” has a mind of its own-and it has no intention of going quietly…

Narration – *** (3 stars)
Story – **** (4 stars)

I have always been a fan of Douglas Preston and Lincoln child, writing together or individually, and The Ice Limit is one of my favorite stand-alones from the duo.

Gideon Crew, however, is not my favorite of their characters. As street smart as one would expect him to be considering his past, he always seems a bit naive, especially when it comes to women. This isn’t a flaw in the writing, just a character trait that I don’t particularly care for.

With that said, I was a little apprehensive going into this – I wanted to go back to the ice limit to see what would happen, but I wasn’t sure I wanted Gideon to come along. I shouldn’t have worried though – this turned out to be my favorite Gideon Crew novel so far. He had a skill set that made him a logical choice for the mission, and he fit right in with the rest of the highly-specialized crew.

The story really felt like a continuation of the original book, and that’s exactly what I was hoping for. It offers an interesting, if not entirely expected, conclusion to the story. If you’ve read and enjoyed The Ice Limit, you should definitely read this one.

The narrator for this audiobook was not bad, but not great. He had a pleasant voice, but put the emphasis in strange places occasionally, which would pull me back out of the story for a second while I re-said the sentence in my mind to make it sound right to me. Maybe no one else does that, but I found it a little distracting. 🙂