I am going to be honest. I hate giving bad reviews. Sometimes when I find a book I don’t take to I try very hard to go through it again and again to find some redeming quality among the disappointment and despair. Sometimes I succeed and I am able to celebrate that one thing the author got right even when everything else feel so very short of my expectations. This is not the case with Wente’s story of industrial espionage and assassination which attempts far too much and ends up becoming a pale and weak story that I almost gave up on more than once.
Ice Man Cometh follows a multi-layered story with multiple viewpoint characters based all over the world. It starts with a great deal of promise in that regard as well as Wente opens the scene to a terrible accident that revealed to be something far more sinister as the story unfolded. Here we see the titular 'Ice Man', a man only passingly referred to later in the text as Chilly, appear to fake a murder by masking it as an accident. Meanwhile on the otherside of the world in Flagstaff Arizona, a young woman called Jeri has become the recipient of a number of mysterious love letters that seem to be coming from all over the world with no rhyme nor reason to them. Jeri herself, a clever and bright young woman and a genius in economics is wasting her life working in a bar, hiding from a recent bereavement and unable to move on with her life. Parallel to this Tom Coleman, an agent for the Department of Homeland Security finds himself embroiled in the mystery as he pieces together a string of killings all over the world that are tied up with Jeri’s mysterious letters.
If you managed to get through that as a premise, then congratulations you have a cast iron mind for disparate and disjointed storylines. This is in essence the major problem I had with Ice Man Cometh, specifically that there is so much going it reads as though several smaller stories have been pressed together until they’re forced to twist into each other. While this may not have been a fatal flaw, it became one because the narratives of each part start off in such wildly different places. Jeri’s story is one of a single girl trying to find her place in the world while Tom’s is a story of ambition and investigation. Chilly’s story differs again as it follows a more tense area which leads us to death and destruction. For the first part of the book these diffuse elements don’t feel like they can be brought together which makes it all the more hard to treat this as a whole piece of fiction. While it does slowly begin to come together in a cohesive story it may well be too little too late for some as it would have meant trudging through well over a third of the book to get anywhere worth going.
A weak overall story does not necessarily destroy a good book either. However, here Wente creates his characters with almost a sense of contempt. That is to say that I found no way to appreciate them or find good in them as they were in themselves all so selfish and hard to relate to. Jeri is a nice enough character but she is far too dull and passive, and while her agony over the death of her father is understandable, the fact that it seems to have paralysed her life seems a little less than organic. Similarly Tom is a boar of a man who doesn’t seem to understand he is the architect of his own tragedy on more than one occasion. While it might seem true to life on some occasions the rest of the time it just becomes tedious as I found myself seeing him bump from one bad move to the next with no overall awareness. These issues with characters leaves them feeling one dimensional for me and I was unable to relax and let them lead the way, leaving me lost and disconnected to an already weak and pontificating narrative.
The one area where Ice Man Cometh truly failed in my opinion was in it’s shocking finale, or to be more exact it’s lack of shocking finale. The central mystery was one which persisted well into the climax which did at some level make me really want to know what was really going on behind the scenes of all these seemingly patterned killings and disappearances. However I ultimately found myself less than impressed with the final revelation which, while being explanatory, failed to be anything more than a huge anticlimax. It left me feeling cheated, and after sticking with the book for as long as I had I felt like my time was wasted. When a story like this fails in its big reveal it is a terrible thing, for it to fail here as well as in so many other areas it is pretty unforgivable.
Getting right down to it Wente had an idea for a book, but rather than editing it down and streamlining his story he added too much making it come across as a bloated frankensteins monster of ideas. I have to stress that not one of these stories was totally bad on it’s own, but bound together as it was it felt too hodge podge and inconsistent to be any good, leaving me very unsure if I will ever want to pick up a Wente book again. It may be that there is an audience for this book somewhere, but if that is true then that is not a place I would like to visit.
Rating: 0.5 out of 5
Ice Man Cometh is available from Amazon. Thanks to Netgalley for providing the review copy.
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