Rating: 
Summary: PAGE-TURNER DEFINED
Review: I've read hundreds of books defined as page-turners, but I never really appreciated the phrase before this one. This truly is an action-packed, non-stop thriller that truly invites you to stick around and see what happens next. Whatever the hour at night. I read it in four evenings (fast for me) and desparately wished it was twice its length. I was impressed with how the characters were leaping from the frying pan to the fire, and surviving - every two pages. The excitement was terrific and relentless. The hero pulled a hidden rabbit out of the hat now and then, but the pure entertainment factor warrants the five star review and the pacing was set at one speed: full ahead ! Sure, there were some lines and words of dialogue that made me groan, but was the book fun ? Entertaining ? A page-turner ? Hell, yes !!! I've got to buy his others now and add them to my collection. This thriller BEGS to be made into a movie, and you will enjoy it immensely. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Over the top silliness
Review: OK, everything about this book is over the top and implausable. If you take it on that level you can get through it on the strength of the non-stop action alone. But it's like watching a bad movie that would be funny if the director really meant it to be tongue-in-cheek. Only you get the feeling that Reilly was trying to write a real novel and didn't see it as a farce. That would still be OK if the factual errors weren't so blaring. Many of them are documented below. One of the multitude of errors that struck me was the understanding of temperature. Early in the book Reilly claims that jet engines are known to freeze in mid-air at -30°. It makes you wonder how airliners make it around in winter at 35,000' without falling to the ground. But if engines freeze at that temperature, it sure doesn't seem to affect human skin exposed for long stretches on hovercrafts speeding at 80 MPH across the ice fields. Let's see, wind chill of -100º and no mention of frostbite. Hmmmm.
Rating: 
Summary: Mmmmmm - junk food reading
Review: Let's get something straight. Sometimes, you're not looking for a filet mignon with cracked lobster salad and a glass of Opus One - you're looking for a greasy cheeseburger with extra fries and a Coke. This book - ICE STATION - is the literary equivalent of that cheeseburger. That being said - this very much a TASTY burger - definitely Big Kahuna class for you Tarantino fans, a reference that befits Reilly's pulp fiction present in this novel. Read the reviews below and you'll see one thing over and over again - ACTION! Grade-A nonstop pulse-pounding action - I've never read an author who has done a better job of cinematically describing battles. If you want detailed high-level intrigue and military action with politics thrown in, stick to Clancy. This is far more Dirk Pitt than Jack Ryan. However, Scarecrow - Reilly's hero - never even really gets a chance to breath here. At least Dirk Pitt had time to relax! I read the book and will read his others when I have the opportunity and want some more book with my fries.
Rating: 
Summary: Whoooooosh!!!
Review: This book.....exciting. Riveting. Action-packed. Breath-taking. Utterly ridiculous. But it's a great read. As some other reviewers have pointed out, there are some serious errors in the book. (For example, as far as I'm able to determine, there is NO F-22 fighter, the FA-22 is currently being tested and supposed to be used by 2005.) But maybe Reilly was just looking ahead. I don't really care about these kinds of errors, frankly, they don't really spoil the read for me. What does kind of spoil it--and the reason I say the book is ridiculous--is that the hero, Scarecrow Schofield, faced certain death no fewer than 40 times in this book, and I'm not exaggerating. He's ALWAYS facing the grim greaper and he escapes every single time. Of course, he has to, he's the hero of the book, but still, that makes the book totally unrealistic. Nobody is that lucky and, Mr. Reilly, if Schofield is really that good, HE WOULDN'T GET INTO ALL THOSE LIFE-THREATENING SITUATIONS!!! I'm a whole lot more impressed by heroes who can avoid death traps through cunning and brilliance than by heroes who get into them all the time and never get killed. That's just too much. It seems like Reilly, as he was outlining the book in preparation for writing, wrote down as many possible ways as he could think of for his hero to get killed and then had him escape all of them. I got a little weary of it, frankly. Another thing I didn't like about the book was its predictability. Ok, we knew Schofield was going to live, he had to, he was the hero. But it was quite obvious, very soon into the book, that the 2 women Marines and the little girl would also live. I mean, we can't be killing women now, can we, that wouldn't be politically correct (and, of course, any one-legged Marine woman can win a fight with a two-legged Marine man.....why didn't the guy just throw his knife at her, like Schofield did at one of his adversaries once? I'm sorry, but I tire of sops to feminism among modern authors.). Well, one woman, a bogeyman, did die, but the "pretty people" didn't. And, of course, the 12 year old girl just happens to be a mathematical genius who saves the day in the end. Please spare me this kind of stuff.... The conspiracy theory theme is also getting old. But this was Reilly's first book, and he's young, and hopefully he'll get better. I haven't read his other 2 books, but I intend to. I will say that, overlooking its obvious problems, the book is very exciting, a page turner. No question. If you like action-packed thrillers with lots of blood, fancy technological equipment, and near-death escapes by the hero on virtually every page, then get this book immediately.
Rating:
Summary: Almost great
Review: I had very high hopes for this book, especially since it was written by a fellow Aussie. Essentially there are two main problems with this book which delegate it from the "great read" to the "quite good" pile. The first problem is the technical accuracy of the writing. There are too many mistakes made by the author which should not have been made if he had done his research properly, for example the subplot of the killer whales attacking the characters in the book, which is factually incorrect due to the fact that killer whales are not aggressive predators. The author also made numerous military terminology and "ratel" mistakes. It was a shame that these errors detracted from the overall experience as I found myself constantly saying "But this just isn't right". The other major problem the author makes is the number of impossible situations the hero manages to escape, for example the battles on the hovercrafts and the firefights with the British SAS. The story would have been helped immensely if the lead character wasn't invincible and/or the situations were more plausible. However, despite these problems, Ice Station is an enjoyable read. It combines "Clancyesque" scenarious with a hint of X-Files and plays out like a Michael Dudikoff B-grade action film. We never gain much of an insight into the main characters personality or psyche and therefore do not develop any relationships with the them. The author was only 23 when he wrote this and I am yet to read any of his other books, but I look forward to them. Hopefully he has learn from his minor mistakes and built on the solid foundations he set in this book.
Rating:
Summary: Well, I really enjoyed the ride!
Review: The things that irked other reviewers didn't bother me a bit. Sure it was unbelievable...geez...why pick up an action thriller if you want a documentary? Ice Station was definitely action-packed, and the characters were well drawn, especially for a first novel. I won't recount the story, as that's been done over and over, but will rather point out what I found enjoyable. The main character was likeable. The setting was exciting--I love arctic adventures. I felt like reading this book was a brief vacation from day-to-day life. It held my interest from beginning to end. I did notice the grammatical errors, but my purpose in reading it was to have a good time, and that I did! I notice that readers of this book also read Rollins--I'm certainly one of those. If you can set reality aside and allow your imagination to roll with the book, you won't be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: IF IT'S ACTION YOU WANT , THEN...............
Review: READ THIS BOOK. I'm not going to re-summarize the details of
the book, the Book Description is done well enough by AMAZON.
But I'll tell you this, I have been looking for a Book that
I cant put down for a long time. THIS IS ACTION, NOT LITERATURE,
and it's heart-pounding and breath-taking. Overlook the
plausability, and enjoy the rush.! The scenes are vivid in my
mind recounting details in the book. I really enjoyed it and
starting AREA 7 next. But I'll tell you this, it will be the HardCopy LargePrint so I can eat a bowl of popcorn and drink
a soda at the same time I'm reading it; because you feel like
you are in the theatre watching an action movie. The book does
read like scripts for an action movie.
Rating:
Summary: Amateurish & hyperventilating
Review: I hate to tear down any book that seems to be an honest effort, as this one does, and I really did want to like this book, but it was just impossible. I kept hoping it would get better, but unfortunately it never did. Reilly's obvious "mission statement" is to write thrillers. All other considerations are irrelevant. This book is so jam-packed with action, it's actually boring. There's a cliff-hanger not at the end of every chapter, but almost twice per page. If you see this book in a bookstore, leaf through it randomly and count the exclamation points and the use of italics. I'm not talking about dialogue, but narrative. Almost every single page has at least one use of italics or an exclamation point -- in the narrative. Reilly apparently doesn't have the chops to describe his scenes without nearly fainting from excitement himself. Frankly, it's off-putting, as if reading a story written by an adolescent. An example from one page selected randomly: . . . And then, slowly, very slowly, the big seal began to open its mouth. RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIS FACE! ... Its mouth began to close AROUND his head... The seal was about to bite his head off. It was going to EAT him! . . . (This text all appears within eight lines on the page. I removed the character's name to prevent any spoilers.) Several others on Amazon apparently liked this book. Maybe you will too. If you're not a real discerning reader, and love action for its own sake, then perhaps you'll like it. But if you do care about half-believable plots and half-decent character development, skip Reilly and move on.
Rating:
Summary: What can I say that hasn't been said before?
Review: To begin with, let me start by saying that there is no author on Earth quite like Reilly, no one that could even compare with this man's almost inhuman skill and easy mastery of the craft of writing. I say this, of course, with the full knowledge that Mr.Reilly's novels are far from the conventional definition of "well written," but you have to realize that THAT'S NOT THE POINT!!! The brilliance of Reilly's work is that he's the first writer who knows how to say "The hell with it! Skip to the action!" If the man knows one thing, its how to get the adrenaline flowing, the heart thudding in the chest. With as few words as possible, he can create whole new worlds, so intricate that it's hard to believe they exist only in the mind. And then, he can turn them into battlefields, creating overblown and absolutley delightful sequences that blow the mind. It's good stuff.
He's in full force with Ice Station, which is set in the freezing South Pole, in and around a remote little research station, under which has been found a mysterious object. After about thirty pages of setup, the first "incursion" (Reilly likes to divide his novels into Crichtonesque sectiones, each about seventy pages long. In Ice Station these are called incursions. In Contest they are Movements, in Area 7 they are Confrontations, and in Temple they are Machinations), an amazing gunfight erupts between our heroes, an American Marine recon. unit led by Liutennant Shane "Scarecrow" Schofield and an elite French unit. The rest? Well, it's more amazing action, including a mole hunt, a brilliant chase sequence, and a batlle with a submarine, and yet another gunfight. Just buy the damn thing.
Rating:
Summary: A rip roaring page turner!!!
Review: If you are in the mood for an extreme action packed book, then this one is definitely for you. The main character Scofield goes through so many arduous tasks that just when you think nothing else can happen you are thrown into another obstacle. The imagination involved in creating these very vivid events is quite fun. If you want true accuracy in your books, then you may want to pass but for an amazing adventure pick this one up and you won't be able to sleep until you turned the last page.
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