I’ve enjoyed all of Lincoln Childs and Douglas Preston’s books and I’ve come to expect certain things from them. There’s almost always a remote location…or if there’s not, there’s a way to make a common location seem remote (like shutting up an entire museum so that even the cops can’t get in!). There’s always a super intelligent antagonist, usually some sort of animal or artificial intelligence. There’s a couple of smart people who figure everthing out and survive…and a bunch of dumb people who don’t listen to the smart people and die in the most horrific — and vividly described — fashion.

(Note that even though this book is by Lincoln Child alone, there are a great many similarities to the books co-authored with Douglas Preston that it feels like they were both there writing.)

Terminal Freeze is no exception. It takes place at a remote army installation in the extreme northern part of Alaska where, of course, there is no way to get help from the outside. (And there’s also a blizzard at just the wrong time of course.) And there’s a bad creature who seems to enjoy killing all of the characters.

This book actually started out kind of slowly, which was a little surprising. It did a good job of giving me the feeling that I was stranded in a remote wilderness…unfortunately, the wilderness in this case was the first third of the book. Basically, there’s a bunch of scientists doing random, not terribly interesting experiments. They find a frozen creature (which they think is a smilodon) and a documentary crew comes to film the unveiling/melting of the creature. It seemed to take forever to get to the first bit of action (when the animal inevitably escapes his frozen prison and starts terrorizing the scientists and film crew, but once it started I quite enjoyed the action.

One particularly good note about this book was that I found myself anxiously awaiting the death of a character. As you read books like this you learn to figure out early which characters are going to die based on their personality and actions. In this book, there’s one character about whom I actually caught myself thinking, “I can’t wait until he dies!” That’s when a realized that the character development in this book is as good — or even better — then I’ve come to expect from Child.

The science in this book was interesting and involved different types of ice (I found more info here: http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/petrolgy/Ice%20Structure.HTM) and sympathetic resonance (more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathetic_resonance). Of course the beast itself is different than any currently existing animal so its description takes advantage of a bit of scientific creative license as well, but I must say that it’s pretty cool.

As usual, the back story ties up nicely at the end and while the story itself seems finished, the characters seem like they’re already on their way to the next adventure/novel.

Overall, Terminal Freeze is not my favorite Lincoln book, but it contais everything you’d expect and everything it needs to be an enjoyable read.