Whiteout by Adriana Anders is a romantic suspense novel with elements of survival and espionage. The tropes are 100% Elyse-bait and the author’s ability to sell me on two people falling in love during some really dire circumstances was impressive. Despite this book being the first full book in a series, readers may want to read the prequel novella in Turn the Tide to be fully introduced to the secondary characters.

The book opens in Antarctica where Ford Cooper is working as a glaciologist and Angel Smith is a chef. Both of them have chosen their remote work site partly to distance themselves from their pasts. Angel is attracted to Ford, but put off by his cold and brusque demeanor.

Just as most of the crew (Angel included) is scheduled to leave for the off-season, the base is attacked. Some very bad people are after ice cores that Ford has been studying. They believe the ice cores contain a virus that would wreak havoc if released as a bio-weapon. All of this culminates in Angel and Ford having to ski to the next research station, hundreds of miles away, while dragging the cores on a sled and dealing with hurricane-force winds and deadly cold.

As much as the shadowy virus-hunting bad guys are the villain of this story, so is the environment. Ford and Angel are only able to make a handful of miles a day, have to ration their food, and are constantly worried about frostbite or painful blisters becoming infected. Added to that, Angel has an old knee injury that makes it hard for her to keep up with Ford. I could feel the desperation of their situation each time one of them wanted to break down, but kept pushing ahead.

All of that would be enough to make me curl up in the fetal position and give up, but Ford and Angel persevere. It becomes apparent that on their own, neither would make it. Instead they fight to survive for each other. When one is weak, physically or emotionally, the other acts as support. The theme of two people coming together when the odds are against them fit beautifully with the emotional intimacy they build.

Nights spent huddled up in their tent, listening to the howling winds, lead them to share things they normally kept bottled up. Angel reveals how she was betrayed by her last partner and was left broke and humiliated. Ford explains how he grew up with an alcoholic father, and how he struggles to interact with large groups of people at a time. Angel realizes that the man she thought was kind of an asshole is just overwhelmed when managing complex social interactions. All of this close-proximity, intimacy building worked really well for me. It allowed the characters to connect deeply in a relatively short period of time, so it made the romance believable. Romantic suspense often deals with condensed timeline and it can be hard to buy that the hero and heroine can fall in love in such a short, fraught time frame. Not here though. There’s also a poignancy to the hero and heroine falling in love while aware that their odds of survival were slim. Given their situation finding that emotional connection felt like a very human need.

They also avoid the whole “danger boner” aspect of being in immediate danger but still having time to get it on. Because of the cold, sex is impossible (or at least extremely ill-advised) and the author gives them time to take a bath before sexy times ever occur since we can safely assume they’d be pretty stinky at that point.

The only thing I didn’t like about this book was that by the latter half, I felt like I’d entered the series somewhere in the middle. Ford’s brother, Eric, who plays an important role in the novel, was previously introduced in the anthology Turn the Tide. I hadn’t read it yet, and I felt that a lot of details about Eric that were super important to his book were covered previously. Eric is no stranger to the world of scary bad men hunting Antarctic viruses, and when he showed up his backstory was a lot to swallow in one chunk. That being said, I was able to use context clues to put everything together and I downloaded Turn the Tide immediately.

I do want to warn readers that while Ford and Angel get their HEA, the book ends on something of a cliffhanger. I assume the suspense arc will be carried through the other novels in the series, so if you need total closure, you might want to hold off until the series is done.

I love romantic suspense with survival elements (especially cold weather survival) and I also really enjoyed the espionage/global threat aspect of the mystery. I wish I’d read the prequel novella first, but it wasn’t a huge issue, and I’m delighted to have a new series to look forward to.