Description:
Dr. Carol Harmon is a bio-acoustic scientist and CEO of the Nolan Group, a worldwide consortium of consulting agencies founded by her second husband, now deceased. She has taken her research vessel, the Phoenix, deep into the Arctic Ocean to track and monitor marine mammals and to study the effects of shipping on the larger members of that group, most specifically blue whales. What she finds is both distressing and exhilarating for a researcher: five huge blues frozen fast to the underside of an ice floe. What happens after two divers return from an exploratory foray beneath the ice is flat-out horrifying. Severe radiation sickness reduces the men to wriggling, blood-spewing wrecks in a matter of hours. The fact is that the entire region is radioactive to the point of being cooked, and as the arctic spring turns to summer, that hot ice will start to flow and likely bring about the first man-made ice age unless it's checked. Fortunately for Carol, Dr. Brock Garner, Carol's first ex and a world-class oceanographer in his own right, is but a radio call away. Nolan Group jets are dispatched and in short order Brock and his massive Ukrainian research assistant, Sergei Zubov, are on the Phoenix and on the case. Meltdown is James Powlik's second race-against-time-to-stop-global- environmental-disaster eco-technothriller. And as in 1999's Sea Change, the partnership works handily. With scientific and environmental technospeak galore (a drop too much, actually) and enough back-stabbing, political dirty-dealing, and military intrigue both foreign and domestic to fill a book twice its size, Meltdown will please Powlik's growing number of followers, Tom Clancy fans, and most anyone with a taste for fast-paced, fact-laced excitement. --Michael Hudson
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