Fifty Degrees Below
Fifty Degrees Below follows Frank, a researcher who has been displaced from his home by a freak flood in Washington DC, and is at the center of American efforts to combat global warming. In the meantime, he has also come onto the radar of the intelligence agencies and their "markets". His new nomadic lifestyle that relies on getting back to nature provides him some defence and enriches his senses.
The quality of the writing in this book sneaks up on you. It's been quite a while since I've really read a science fiction book, but in the first couple of hundred pages I was sorely disappointed -- the standard of the prose and dialogue seemed more at the level of The Da Vinci Code than anything else, and throughout the entire book the "love" story is equally as bad. But over the course of the story, while the writing mechanics improved slightly, it was the vision and the plot that really made it compelling and in the end very enjoyable. There's much to be learned about the environment too -- a great deal of research has gone into making this accurate and informative.