A review by eggcatsreads
Whiteout: A Thriller by R.S. Burnett, R.S. Burnett

adventurous challenging tense medium-paced

4.0

 

With a premise that hooked me from the start, Whiteout is an Antarctic survival thriller set during the end of the world, that makes you question how much you’d be willing to fight to survive even in the most dire of circumstances. 

I love thriller and horror set in the cold barren wastes of the Antarctic, since it makes every little thing that happens much more deadly and serious. In most survival scenarios, the main protagonist could, in theory, leave to go somewhere else. Not so, when doing so will almost guarantee their death within a few hours in subzero weather. This raises all the stakes when things go wrong, since our main character has to determine how to survive both her current circumstances - as well as the unforgiving polar night. 

The one thing that didn’t quite work for me in this book was the family drama that was interspersed throughout the book, as I personally couldn't care less about the potential fracturing of our main character’s marriage or her missing her daughter. While this is important for the motivations of our main character, I just am not someone who cares about family drama in novels, and so when these chapters were spread throughout I will admit to only half-paying attention to them. I don’t think the book would have been any different had the main character and her husband not had some issues, as in both scenarios she’s mourning their potential death during a potential nuclear war. 

However, the main overall intensity and pace of this book kept me interested until the last page, and there were quite a few twists that I did see coming - and one I only realized before the last page during its reveal. If you were looking for a quick survival thriller, with a main character who does everything she can to survive despite both the circumstances and the bleak reality she’s found herself in, I would recommend picking up this book. 

A huge thank you to the author, NetGalley, and Crooked Lane Books for providing this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.