Michael Parker has written a compelling book about oil exploration on the North Slope of Alaska. Unfortunately, he also grafted into this setting a murder mystery. More unfortunate is his lack of an attentive editor.

I've been on oil rigs in Wyoming during the winter. It's cold and dangerous. Multiply that cold and danger exponentially, and it must surely be as Parker has described in North Slope. The scenes at the drilling camp, on the rig, traversing the Arctic range by bulldozer and dogsled are vivid and well structured. If this book had simply been about the struggles and terrors of drilling for oil in Alaska, the book would be worth four-to-five stars. His descriptions are that good. But the murder mystery is not. In a way, it's like an Agatha Christie whodunit, with a circumscribed set of suspects within a confined location - not a locked room, but a landlocked (but for a helicopter) setting. I don't find Christie's mysteries interesting, and I didn't find this mystery interesting either.

But the biggest problem with this book is the want of an editor. Coffee is always "piping hot." Words are missing as in the sentence, "McKinnon looked at him for seemed like an eternity." I'm pretty sure he's missing the word "what". The word "but" appears as "hut". I have no idea what this means: "The silhouette in the front left-hand oat moved..." Sometimes the word "river," associated with a specific river, is capitalized, and sometimes not. Words are strangely capitalized, such as "company" and "law" though without any context that would suggest capitalization would be proper. The pronoun "I" often appears as the number "1". Comparing two oilmen, Parker writes that "He didn't know which of them had been the best,.." A comparison of two should result in one being "better," not "best". Plots are too frequently described as "evil". In an unnecessary sex scene, the protagonist's lover "put both her hands around the hack of his head." Perhaps that should have been "back of his head," unless "hack" is a part of the cranial anatomy of which I'm unfamiliar.

The beauty of an e-book is that it can be edited and republished. I'd suggest Parker find the time to do that. ( )

First published in 1980 by macmillan, this action packed thriller is inspired by the discovery of oil beneath the ice wilderness known as the North Slope in Alaska. It is now available on Amazon in paperback. ( )