Excellent characterisation; complex and intriguing story which can be difficult to follow. Innes writes with depth and descriptive prowess, but some of the complex sailing terminology will no doubt scare people away. ( )

Not one of his best but still worth a read. A scientist flies over the Antarctic and spots a ship abandoned, he decides to try and locate but dies before he can start an expedition. His widow recruits a crew to explore the region and hopefully find the ship. Well researched as always with Innes and he really thrives when writing about these sort of wilderness areas. One thing I hated though, and it is a personal bugbear, when speech it written in dialect I find it distracts from the flow of the book, this time it is the Scottish characters. ( )

It's not that Isvik is formulaic. It's not. But it is also a somewhat tired story. One of Innes' later works, Isvik almost seems to be the product of someone who is writing out of habit. Some of his old thrills are still there: the trip through the Andes and the voyage to the Weddell Sea. But the interaction among the characters is stale. And that is one thing early Innes used to be good at. For an adventure novelist, he nonetheless invested in character revelations that were meaningful in novels such as The Wreck of the Mary Deare, The Strange Land, The Strode Venturer, Solomons Seal, and Levkas Man. Here, things are superficial. Were that it balanced with a fast paced plot, you might forgive Innes. But he falls down on that score, too, as Isvik tends to slowly plod through events at times. Still, it's better than 90 percent of adventure fare out there. Just disappointing in comparison with Innes' earlier works.

And a note about the nautical detail in this novel. I do admire Innes for continually providing such overwhelming authenticity to his sea novels through the intricate descriptions of life at sea, especially aboard sailing vessels. Not since Herman Melville have I encountered quite this degree of nautical phrases, terms, and practices. But he does so without alienating the reader who might not be familiar with all the terminology. (It helps, by the way, to have a Kindle in this day and age to read books like this. For most of my reading life, I would read in bed and keep a portable dictionary right above my head for just such instances of technical phrases and terms that so dominates an Innes book. But a Kindle makes that information available at the touch of a finger, now. Much easier to access.) ( )

A glaciologist flying over the Antarctic thinks he’s seen a ghost ship from two centuries before. Was it a real ship? He isn’t saying, because he was found dead after his plane crashed. His widow is mounting an expedition to find the ship, and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, is fronting some money to get the ship for their collection. An eccentric Scotsman who won big on the pools is fronting most of the money, and our narrator, a recently laid-off wood preservation expert, is roped in to the group as well. The expedition will be a real mixed bag: will everyone be able to get along and actually find the ship?

I was really excited to read this book, because books about boats and about Antarctica are my jam. But this book took forever to get to Antarctica. In fact, I got as far as part 3 and they STILL hadn’t left South America! There are characters with ties to the Dirty War in Argentina and “los desaparecidos” (the disappeared), and the one female character (the glaciologist’s widow… now there’s a book title for you) seems to exist largely to be attractive to the other male characters and sleep with one who may or may not be her full brother (if not her half-brother) to get information out of him about her husband’s last flight. Ew.

I also found the eccentric Scotsman tiresome because his accent is written as eye dialect, and he’s dropping final G’s everywhere and saying Ah instead of I. “Ah cannae believe how tiresome readin’ a stereotypical Scots accent in print is”.

So yes, I’ve bailed on this book. Haven’t bailed on the author yet, but wow would I ever NOT recommend this one. ( )

Interesting tale with a macabre ending. Set in 1980s it's a story of a ship trapped in the ice, the Falklands and the Desaparecidos, those who vanished without a trace in Argentina ( )