Beneath the Dark Ice (Alex Hunter #1)

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Title: Beneath the Dark Ice
Series: Alex Hunter
Author: Greig Beck
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Action/Adventure
Pages: 321
Format: Kindle Digital Editions




 


Synopsis:
A plane full of rich folk crash into Antarctica. Rescue teams of medical and military groups have all disappeared without a trace.
So the United States sends in a team of scientists guarded by an elite of the elite military team.
Potential oil reserves are involved so the Russians gets involved. Mainly with mercenaries who have a grudge against one of the Elite of the elite.

There is also a monster and a whole "pre-historic" world under the ice. Almost everybody dies and a lot get eaten. We also learn who Alex Hunter is and that maybe Amygdala [from the Batman comics] isn't so out of the realm of possibility.

My Thoughts:
Passionate about Books recommended this to me and I am glad she did. This was a lot of fun with a great amount of people getting eaten by a monster. I just love it when people get eaten in stories. Dinosaurs are my favorite way but monsters will do in a pinch.

The titular hero, Alex Hunter, while the main character, is not a dominating main character. The whole story was about him and the scientist chick. The side characters, while fodder, felt as much a part of the necessary story as those two. We get a brief shotgun blast of info about Hunter and why he is pretty much superhuman now.  Having read some Batman comics, I am aware of the amygdalia so Beck's discussion wasn't news to me.

I did roll my eyes however. Come on, getting shot in the head turns you into a superhuman? I think I'd take my chances with outerspace radiation [Fantastic 4], nuclear spiders [Spiderman] or even a gamma bomb [the Hulk]. My only other eye roll quibble was how fast the linguistics scientist decoded the picturegrams that were 10K years old.  So if you can deal with those two issues, everything else is just fine.

The writing was a little unpolished but not in a "I'm an indie and I don't give 2 ***** because I'm an AUTHOR" way. I think this might have been Beck's first book? If so, that would certainly explain it.

I'm definitely hooked and will be reading more of this series as I can.