34/100

Not starting the year off with a bang. My seventh Follett book and the first miss he's had with me. I liked almost nothing in this book. The one saving grace is that there's a dommy muscle mommy who likes to beat up dudes.

There's a heist in this book, which I'm not a fan of. I didn't like or connect to any of the characters. There's a weird adolescent romance (the girl is 14 and the boy is 15) between relatives (through marriage, but still) that is entirely too detailed. The other romance in the book is unbelievable and bad. Follett's prose, which I can usually overlook because the characters and plot of his books are so good, grated on me in this one, perhaps because the book was so mediocre I couldn't see passed his lack in writing ability.

It's undoubtedly a fast-paced "page turner," but that doesn't mean anything when it's just not a good book. I'll stick to Kenny's historical epics for now on.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BCTcSIgRt...

A canister of a deadly virus is missing. Toni Gallo, a former police detective, is the head of security at the lab. She thought the safety measures in place made the lab impenetrable but now she has a major problem. How can they find the virus and keep the public from panicking? Will their investors desert them now?

This is a great thriller from the beginning to the end. A race against the clock hampered by an unexpected blizzard makes Toni Gallo's job far more difficult. Can she track the virus down before it can be used for nefarious purposes?

I enjoyed this book. I'd probably give it 3 1/2 stars if I could. It was my first Follett and I picked it specifically because it wasn't 1,000 pages long...wanted to ease myself in.

The storyline wasn't anything unique, but I felt like I got to know the characters.. really liked the ones I liked and really disliked the ones I didn't. The story moved very quickly, was descriptive, but not overly so. And I finished wishing there was more. I've read in some others' reviews that this was not his best work. I've been wanting to read Pillars and World Without End so if they get better then I'm definitely looking forward to more of his writing.

Das ist einmal wieder so ein Buch, von dem ich sagen kann, dass es eigentlich super geschrieben ist: Spannend, gut zu lesen etc. Auch das Thema ist spannend, fesselnd erzählt etc. Aber trotzdem habe ich es mindestens zwei der dreimal angefangen und wenn ich es nicht als Hörbuch gelesen hätte, wäre es immer noch ungelesen. Manchmal packen mich diese Bücher einfach nicht und zwar nur, weil mich das Thema nicht fesselt, obwohl es spannend ist und alles.
Also eigentlich kann an sagen: Ich kann das Buch durchaus empfehlen, aber mich hat es nur einfach nur mäßig interessiert.

Na véspera de Natal Toni Gallo, a responsável pela segurança das instalações da Oxenford Medical, uma empresa farmacêutica que está a desenvolver um antivírus para umas das variantes do Ébola, descobre que um dos cientistas da empresa está desaparecido. E, juntamente com ele, um fármaco altamente perigoso. Quando o descobrem, em sua casa, este encontra-se em estado crítico, e suspeitam que está contaminado um vírus perigosíssimo. Ao mesmo tempo, um grupo terrorista tem andado planear assaltar as mesmas instalações e para isso estão a contar com a ajuda do filho do dono do administrador da empresa Stanley Oxenford.
Um livro completamente diferente daqueles que estou habituada a ler de Ken Follett, mas nem por isso decepcionante. Adorei ler este A Ameaça, que me prendeu desde o primeiro momento, de tal forma foi interessante o enredo. Primeiro porque nos deixa a pensar no modo como são protegidos todos estes estudos para a procura de antivírus para as principais doenças que assolam a humanidade e depois até que ponto é que chegam os escrúpulos de uma pessoa. Kit mostra-se um homem desinteressante, completamente diferente do pai e das irmãs, a quem o dinheiro é a coisa mais importante na vida. Carl Osborne, um jornalista sensacionalista em busca da melhor notícia, doa a quem doer, ultrapassando tudo e todos, mesmo que isso custe o “amor” (??) da sua vida. E, por outro lado, a família de Stanley, com os problemas adjacentes, Olga e o seu marido mulherengo, Miranda e o seu namorado Ned e os filhos e de ambos os casais

Αν βαθμολογούσα την πλοκή και τη λογική των γεγονότων μπορεί και να έβαζα 1/5. Οι χαρακτήρες κάνουν ό,τι χρειάζεται απλώς για να κινηθεί η ιστορία. Είναι μαριονέτες.

Αλλά από την άλλη είναι ευκολοδιάβαστο και κλιμακωτά αγωνιώδες. Στην ουσία το διάβασα σε 3-4 καθισιές, σε διαλείματα στη δουλειά.

A TOTALLY DIFFERENT SIDE OF KEN FOLLETT'S WRITING OF "PILLARS OF THE EARTH" AND "WORLD WITHOUT END".
IT WAS A GOOD ACTION STORY WITH A LOT OF RESEARCH AND DETAILS THAT MADE YOU PICTURE EVERYTHING VERY WELL. I ENJOYED IT AND COMPLETED IT IN TWO DAYS.

DNF - page 96 (20%)

Spoilers only because excessive swearing in my joke, no actual spoilers. -->
On page 74 one character says, "Where's my fucking money?" and all I could think about for the next 20 pages was the vine of the little girl throwing her doll saying, "Where's my fucking money, bitch?" and the the Law & Order theme plays.

I decided to sample another work from the author of one of my favorite books, The Pillars of the Earth. It was extremely disappointing. I made it through about a third of the book and it was a vanilla drama of killer viruses and apparently a big storm on the way and the scientists and security guards that attempt to fight outbreak and hardship. It's the sort of thing that might have been written by any of a sheaf of modern authors like Michael Crichton, Patricia Cornwell or James Patterson and probably would have been better done. A third into the novel, I didn't identify with or care about any of the characters. There was a minor dramatic event that wrapped up rather completely except for some upcoming bad press for our main characters. The title promised blizzardy badness, and it has just started to snow outside, but it just isn't worth trudging on to find out what bad happens when the cold weather sets in.

Blink once or twice and you might mistake Whiteout's opening act for that other ode to mysophobia, The Hot Zone. Coming a full ten years after Richard Preston's fan favorite, Follett administers a quick shot of déjà vu, retreading familiar themes early on before cracking the lid on a dizzyingly diverse cast and a bioterrorist plot filched straight from a Hollywood screenplay. Whereas The Hot Zone is an uneasy mix of nonfiction gussied up in sensationalist garb, Whiteout is pure novel—and quite the kind for which Follett's reputation precedes him. While the former fixes its attention almost solely on the pathogen, even idolizing it at times, the latter sculpts its drama around the many characters tangled up in the threatening peril of a diffuse outbreak.

Renowned Scottish pharmaceutical Oxenford Medical specializes in lab-based research on some of nature's deadliest viruses. The scourge du jour here is the fictitious "Madoba-2," the deadliest of them all. No one has survived its acquaintance; it is the perfect pathogen. When a narrowly tested vaccine for Madoba-2 goes missing from the Kremlin lab, along with an unwell rabbit reserved for in vivo trials, the company finds itself at the center of a media firestorm. It is the arch responsibility of ex-cop turned Chief of Oxenford Security Toni Gallo to track down the culprit and contain the leak.

With public confidence at an all-time low, the gears of a far more sinister plot are about to be set in motion. Opposite Toni Gallo is the chairman Stanley Oxenford, whose own son is embroiled in a devilish agenda of malfeasance in order to settle his escalating gambling debts. A highly trained unit of heist artists taps Kit Oxenford, a computer wiz who designed the Kremlin's security system before being fired for lifting funds from the firm's bottom line, to break in and theft hazardous materials. Desperate to pay off his creditors, and with his life hanging in the balance, Kit finds himself throwing in with a roguish crew whose intentions are unclear. As the holidays descend upon snow-covered Scotland, the Oxenfords gather at Steepfall, the family estate, only to find themselves key players in thwarting an international crisis.

The number of characters introduced as the plot takes shape can feel like a flood, but Follett has the knack for bringing the reader up to speed with well-placed summaries of how each character factors into the immediate scene and reminders of earlier details. While some of the Oxenford clan are standard-issue, many characters turn in quite memorable performances, chief among them Toni Gallo. True to form, Follett invariably reserves the most candescent performances for his strong female leads. While not quite attaining the level of depth and sophistication of Aliena in Pillars of the Earth, Flick in Jackdaws, or Lucy in Eye of the Needle, Toni stands head and shoulders above the rest with her steely resolve and poised demeanor. Her detective training allows her to stay one step ahead of the local constabulary and outsmart the assailants who hauled off with the precious cargo.

The book is not without its faults. An early scene at the family estate borders on soap opera melodramatics and seems out of place in a Follett novel. That the security system wasn't changed—right down to the thumbprint software on the BSL-4 chamber and the passcodes on the virus lockers—following Kit's departure from the company reeks of dubious plausibility. A few of the twists and turns feel forced and wrap up a bit too neatly, leaving one to wonder how a more organic progression might have played out. And, though many may neither care nor notice, some of the finer points on the science side of things skew toward the problematic.

The Science of Whiteout

As part of his research, we're told in the addendum, Follett visited biosafety facilities in Manitoba and London and corresponded with a few biosecurity professionals. Had he consulted virologists as well, he might have brought greater accuracy to the details surrounding Madoba-2 and its supposed cousin. The science in Whiteout, what little of it there is, for the most part is not bad, but, like Richard Preston before him, gives a misleading picture of Ebola.

Madoba-2 is frequently compared to the Ebola strain and even referred to as a "variant" of Ebola on one occasion. But the descriptions of Madoba-2 are at odds with what we know about the biology of Ebola and how it has adapted to circulate among human populations. Madoba-2 is airborne, so much so that the terrorists choose a perfume bottle as the delivery mechanism.

Ebola, meanwhile, is a close-contact germ; its proteins prefer to hole up in fluids like blood, saliva, feces, and urine rather than in its host's respiratory pathways. To speak of a virus that wafts on clouds of aerosol droplets emitted by a cough or a sneeze—à la influenza—is to speak of a fundamentally different virus from the strain that's been ravaging West Africa since December 2013. Suffice to say that if Ebola were even a little like Madoba-2, the current epidemic would be global, not confined to regions with poor medical infrastructure.

Lastly, Madoba-2's level of efficiency is unexampled in nature. With a human mortality rate of 100%, Madoba-2 is clearly not of this world. A non-free-living organism that killed too efficiently would jeopardize its ability to spread to new hosts. Dead hosts are like wet gunpowder, an evolutionary endgame. With every pathogen we've encountered, some portion of the susceptible population is resistant and passes on its immunity to successive generations. That is, until the virus adapts to the new regime and the cycle repeats. Even Ebola, among the deadliest viruses known, has topped out at 90% mortality in some populations. All considered, Madoba-2 sounds more like something engineered by man than something that would arise naturally.

Closing Thoughts

You're always in good hands with Follett. The brigadier general of historical fiction delivers another suspenseful tale worthy of the big screen, this time cutting his teeth on the killer virus motif in modern-day Scotland. While this may stray outside Follett's typical genre, all of the key elements are ported over intact. Thanks to its intriguing characters, smooth pacing and a Costco's worth of page-turning tension without an excess of sex or violence, Whiteout joins a rich legacy of polished narrative that leaps off the page with ease. Settle in for a night of frosty weather, dueling ambition, budding romance, and a high-strung thriller just compelling enough to dispel disbelief. A fine choice for your next weekend away.

Note: This review is republished from my official website.

The first book that I read by Ken Follett was Pillars of the Earth and I loved it. I read another of his books afterwards and it was completely different. I didn't even think I was reading the same author. This book is the polar opposite of Pillars of the Earth. POE was an epic, period piece that was thoughtful, exciting, historical fiction that kept me turning pages. Whiteout was just dumb. From the crooked son, to the horny detective, to the stereotypical rich standoffish but gently old guy... ugh. It was so ridiculous. I absolutely hate when a man tries to write a sexual experience from a woman's point of view. He has NO idea what women think or feel. "Much to her dismay, she could feel herself get wet." (not a direct quote, but it was something like that) Puuuleease. News flask Ken, women don't get boners like guys do. Beyond the gratuitous sex references that were thankfully not too frequent, the story was just too contrived. Again, this book disappointed and probably will be the last I read from Mr. Folett. I believe he took his best shot with POE.