Product Description

As a Christmas Eve blizzard whips out of the north, several people converge on a remote family house. As the storm worsens, the emotional sparks-jealousies, distrust, sexual attraction, rivalries-crackle, desperate secrets are revealed, hidden traitors and unexpected heroes emerge.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #158041 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Bestseller Follett sets his sights on biological terrorism, pumping old-school adrenaline into this new breed of thriller. Ex-policewoman Antonia "Toni" Gallo, head of security at a boutique pharmaceuticals company, has discovered that two doses of an experimental drug—developed as a potential cure for the deadly Madoba-2 virus—have vanished from her top-secret laboratory. This mystery is a precursor to a more serious crime being planned by Kit Oxenford, the gambling-addicted son of the company's founder, Stanley Oxenford. Kit, deeply in debt to mobster Harry Mac, sees a raid on his father's lab as a chance to score enough money to disappear and start anew in another country. Some characters are a bit familiar—the pesky, unprincipled journalist; the imbecilic police detective—but others, the mobster's psychopathic daughter in particular, show idiosyncratic originality. After a long buildup, the burglary is set in motion, and Kit's best-laid plans begin to fall apart. Eventually, good guys and bad guys end up at the Oxenford family estate, trapped in the house by a fierce snowstorm as they battle one another over the material stolen from the laboratory. A romance between the recently widowed Stanley and Toni and the unexpected addition of Toni's comically addled mother thicken the plot as Follett's agonizingly protracted, nail-biter ending drags readers to the very edge of their seats and holds them captive until the last villain is satisfactorily dispatched.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Follett's latest is a bio-thriller taking place over a wintry Christmas holiday in northern Scotland and well larded with family drama. Toni Gallo is the driven head of security for Oxenford Medical (aka the Kremlin), a research facility working on a cure for Madoba-2, an especially virulent strain of Ebola. She also has a running feud with her ex, a local cop, and is pestered by the attentions of newsman Carl. But she really wants to be with her widower boss, Stanley, whose daughter Olga's husband, Hugo, is paying unwelcome attention to his sister-in-law, Miranda, herself in uneasy love with a milquetoast boyfriend, Ned, whose daughter, Sophie, is the object of young Craig's budding affections. It is not until midnight on Christmas Eve that all this soap is rinsed away, and the plot kicks into high gear, as a band of desperate, violent thieves, led by Stanley's wastrel son, Kit, lay siege to the well-defended Kremlin in the midst of a terrible blizzard. Predictably, things go suddenly, frightfully wrong. From here on out, Follett's sure hand at the controls of a high-octane plot delivers the expected thrills in expected ways. Expect interest from readers who know what to expect. David Wright
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
An adrenaline pumping thriller. -- Associated Press

Movie-style twists and hairbreadth escapes. -- Wall Street Journal

Undeniably suspenseful. -- Entertainment Weekly

Customer Reviews

(3 1/2) A Christmas Tale of a Deadly Virus
This story involves the juxtaposition of two currently popular plot devices. The first is one frequently utilized by the author in several his previous novels - thrillers based on the nefarious agenda of a group with motives related to a "headline topic" of current interest. (E.g. THE THIRD TWIN, which was published during the initial period of the debate over the ethical and practical questions regarding cloning). The second is the attempt by many authors to capitalize on the book purchasing aspects of the holiday season by incorporating (often in a quite nominal fashion) a Christmas element into a story true to their traditional genre, thereby appealing to both their traditional readers and a wider audience looking for a Christmas story. (THE CHRISTMAS THIEF by Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark - two star review 12/6/2004 - is an example of this trend.) Unfortunately, Follett's effort results in a novel that neither lives up to its potential nor is likely to satisfy his myriad fans.

The story starts off as a pretty formulaic thriller, Antonia "Toni" Gallo, the security chief at Oxenfeld Medical, a Scottish research firm, discovers a discrepancy in the BSL4 (the most secure BioSafety Level) on Christmas Eve and then discovers that lab tech Michael Ross never returned from his recent vacation. As Toni and her staff investigate, the stakes soon escalate and worries erupt about the potential for a virus to have escaped the lab. Toni is the central character in the novel, her career having been resurrected by Stanley Oxenfeld (the company's founder and research director) after her forced resignation from a promising career in the local police department had left her at a seeming professional dead end. Toni is determined to control the problem, both in order to prove to Stanley his confidence in her was not misplaced and because of the catastrophic nature of the biohazard posed by the involved virus. As the story proceeds, lab security is again breached and the problems of the police, Toni and her security staff, and the perpetrators are compounded by a ferocious blizzard that literally WHITEOUTs the entire landscape.

This engaging and well plotted scenario is juxtaposed with several intrapersonal struggles and potential love interests. Toni is attracted to Stanley but convinced that his interest in her is simply professional. Meanwhile, through an unfortunate circumstance Police Superintendent Frank Hackett is assigned to be the lead investigator on the case; he had unceremoniously ended his romance with Toni when she was forced to resign from the force. In addition, a local reporter refuses to stop pursuing Toni, both for information about the situation at Oxenfeld and to try to convince her to date him. At the same time, Stanley's Oxenfeld's dysfunctional family is gathering at his remote country house for the Christmas holidays, and when Toni is invited she is appalled that she will be forced to interact with Stanley's son Kit, who was fired by his father based on evidence of theft that Toni uncovered. A further complicating factor is the role in the story that will be played by the attraction of Stanley's teenage grandson Craig (Stanley's daughter Olga's son) to Sophie (the sullen daughter of the fiancé of Stanley's other daughter Miranda). Of course, the villains also are an intriguing group, especially Daisy, who seems to be a true sociopath.

This is a very easy and enjoyable book to read - it is fast paced with the chapter titles consisting of the time sequence of the events evolved; it is composed of short chapters (longer than James Patterson but in his style) which alternate among the various participants. It contains some occasionally moving sequences regarding human emotion, and the idea is actually quite clever. In addition, Toni Gallo is a an interesting and well developed character.

However, despite the fun that I had reading it, it was not what I or probably other Follett readers expect and certainly not the book that "rockets Follett to a class by himself" as the dust jacket claims. The ending becomes foreordained, and while I actually appreciate that Follett concluded the story without the seeming obligatory violence and landscape strewn with dead bodies that authors of this genre often employ, the story gradually deteriorated from the standard thriller to a Christmas tale of love and betrayal, and the attempt to provide a feelgood ending went beyond the believable, particularly the last two pages of an unnecessary final chapter. For most of the time that I was reading this book, I felt sure that my rating would be a minimum of four stars. And I still want to emphasize that it is an enjoyable read and many individuals may consider it to be an interesting story; it will probably be especially attractive for speedreaders because there are few nuances and there is little need to worry about complexities. Nevertheless, I decided to round down my final rating to three stars because my reaction to the contrived conclusion was so lukewarm that the more I contemplated the story in preparing this review the more I realized how disappointing it was in comparison with many of the author's previous efforts.

Tucker Andersen

A Blizzard of Bio-Terror
Set in Oxenford Medical, a biomedical facility in Scotland, a lab technician is found dead at home, presumably the victim of a deadly Ebola virus variant housed at the facility. Beautiful and brainy females are often front-and-center in Ken Follett novels; in "Whiteout" it is Toni Gallo, former cop and current director of security for Oxenford, developer of anti-viral drugs to combat these deadly viruses. It is these drugs that attract the attention of a band of international burglars, commissioned by a presumed competitor to steal Oxenford's latest research. Kit Oxenford, the spoiled and sniveling son of Oxenford founder and CEO Stanley Oxenford, was the designer of the lab's security systems before being dumped from the firm for embezzlement. Up to his eyeballs in gambling debt and furious with his father for not cashing him out, the despicable Kit joins the band of thugs, providing all the information needed to override Oxenford security. But as the freak Christmas Eve storm shifts course towards the Scottish coast, this story of high-tech thievery becomes a tale as much about the weather as it is about bio-terrorism.

While this unlikely story is predictable and a bit over embellished, it is nonetheless gripping entertainment, hooking the reader in the first few pages and keeping them turning until the last bad guy is finally dispatched. Follett is never one to let rationality get in the way of a good story, and "Whiteout" is no exception - to the reader's benefit. A bit of a Robin Cook bio-thriller with some "Die Hard" thrown in, Follett's lean prose demonstrates again his uncanny ability as a storyteller, cranking out page-after page of non-stop action unadorned by fine literary baggage. While few characters in "Whiteout" are memorable, the brutish "Daisy" adds an interesting new dimension to the familiar psycho-thug, while the terminally dysfunctional Oxenford family provided some black comedy along with critical plot content. As long as the reader doesn't spend inordinate time dissecting the plot or the characters, and isn't overly distracted by some heavy-handed schmaltz, "Whiteout" is indeed terrific entertainment - the written-word version of that holiday season film the critics love to hate but viewers love to see.

Merry Christmas!
Here's a twisted little Yule tale for you! Follett writes a nail-biting edge-of-your-seater bio-thriller about what happens when the scion of a pharmaceutical company is in hoc to the Mob. Another excellent tale of fathers and sons striving to be men, this one is solved by a woman, a really great character who gratuitously falls in love with the paterfamilias of the pharma firm. This would have been a great book without the love interest. There's no need to gild the Christmas lily.

Jim