Whiteout
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4.0 • 61 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
A family Christmas, a blizzard, and a deadly virus let loose. Filled with startling twists, Whiteout is the ultimate knife-edge drama from bestselling author Ken Follett.
A Family Reunited
As a blizzard descends from the north on Christmas Eve, several people converge on a remote family estate in Scotland. Stanley Oxenford, director of a pharmaceutical research company, has everything riding on a drug he is developing to fight a lethal virus.
A Brewing Storm
Several others are interested in his success too: his children, at home for Christmas with their offspring, have their eyes on the money he will make; Toni Gallo, forced to resign from the police department in disgrace, is betting her career on keeping the drug safe; and a local television reporter, determined to move up, has sniffed the story, even if he has to bend the facts to tell it.
A House Under Siege
A sinister gang spots an opportunity to use one of Stanley’s children against him and steal the virus. As everyone takes shelter, it becomes apparent that being inside the house may be more dangerous than the storm outside, especially when a lethal virus might be on the loose . . .
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.
Customer Reviews
nice book
really worth a read
Poor
Starts out well but becomes more contrived, unbelievable and tiresome as it goes along. Very lazy writing. The ending is particularly weak and the epilogue insulting. Avoid.
Whiteout
For the usually brilliant Follett this was disappointing but it will not put me off reading his other novels.