Title: Whiteout
Author: Adriana Anders
Published: January 2020
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
Readership: Adult
Genre: Romantic Suspense
Rating: ★★★★
I received a copy of Whiteout from Netgalley in exchange for a fair and honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
Angel Smith is ready to leave Antarctica for a second chance at life. But on what was meant to be her final day, the research station is attacked. Hunted and scared, she and glaciologist Ford Cooper barely make it out with their lives…only to realize that in a place this remote, there’s nowhere left to run.
Isolated in the middle of a long, frozen winter with a madman at their heels, they must fight to survive in the most inhospitable—and beautiful—place on earth. But the outside world depends on what Ford and Angel know and, as their pursuers close in and their new partnership burns bright and hot, they will stop at nothing to make it out of the cold alive.
It should not come as a surprise to anyone who knows me well that I love a story set in Antarctica. It appears to be rare enough to set a story on that continent that when I do find a book that takes place there I’m going to immediately want to read it because: Antarctica!
Whiteout is a romantic suspense novel that follows Angel – a base cook ready to leave Antarctica for good – and Ford – a former military man turned glaciologist – who must trek across the hostile continent to escape from man bent on killing them and reclaiming something he believes belongs to him.
What can I say about this book?
First, I chose to read it on one of our hottest Summer days, which may have actually been an inspired choice, because Anders wrote the landscape in such a way that I could (almost) feel the cold.
But more seriously, this book was tense from the first two chapters onward. The book opens with a man being tortured to death for information on ice core samples and the story really takes off from there.
Angel Smith came to Antarctica to recover from an accident and a bad relationship. As a cook, she’s made plenty of friends on the base and is a bright light for many of them as she shares the food she makes with enthusiasm and enjoyment. The only person she can’t quite crack is Ford Cooper, a man who refuses to let any emotion show and avoids Angel at any cost because she’s just too loud, and he’d rather spend his time alone on the ice.
Angel is the one to stumble on the deadly plot and is left behind by the antagonists when the weather turns until it comes to light that Ford is also still at the base and the two hatch a plan to escape to the next closest base and radio for help from there. The only problem is that it requires them to cross 250 miles of ice and snow during the on-coming Winter season and they have limited food supplies and injuries that will inevitably slow them down.
I really enjoyed the characters of Angel and Ford – very different from one another, they provided a good contrast to each other as the story progressed. Despite being out of her league for such a journey, Angel is a strong woman determined not to let circumstances (or Ford’s cold shoulder) beat her down. Her persistence and strength is what begins to thaw out Ford’s feelings toward her. Likewise, we begin to understand why Ford is the way he is and the loyalty he can feel when motivated.
The antagonists were, to be honest, kind of cardboard-cutout-y, but it didn’t really matter because the romantic suspense element was pretty good. There’s decent sexual tension between the main characters, threat of certain death the whole way through the book and a setting so vast and unforgiving that you never, for a second, believe that anything Angel and Ford do is easy.
I’m not sure yet if I’ll continue the series, but this story was everything I wanted: tense, action-packed and with a romance story that was on-point.
Noveltea Corner 