An enjoyable page-turner with some wonderful descriptive writing, particularly of the frozen wastes of Siberia. However, too many loose ends and implausible scenarios to make this a truly great spy thriller ( )

It does what it says on the cover: 'adventure thriller'. It's hard not to turn the pages... ( )

Very exciting thriller set in Siberia with super secret Russian base, lots of Artic ethnic groups and a daring swashbuckling hero. ( )

Exceptional offbeat minimalist thriller, with an unlikely hero -- a "Native Canadian" linguistic anthropologist! (Actually, I think the proper term is "First Nations".)

The book didn't quite suit my purposes at the time -- I was about to board a plane, so I wanted a relatively mindless airport novel -- but it generates its own peculiar level of excitement. It's closer in style to, say, George Smiley interviewing and re-interviewing retired Circus employees and shuffling through redacted reports -- in other words, a patient, incremental enumeration of observations and deductions and steps taken.

But it's not a procedural in the usual sense; the narrative is set on a few continents, and the last third of the novel is pretty much an extended chase sequence. It's a surprisingly complex plot nonetheless, full of carefully calibrated moments of subterfuge, and this complexity is all the more impressive considering the fact that the plot elements can be boiled down to only two phases: there's a top-secret base, and our hero has to get in, and he has to get out. Recommended. ( )

Thriller de espias, que cae en los topicos. Apaorta poco, quizas solo el escenario. Demasiado fantasioso. ( )