Cold Skin
Albert Sanchez Pinol
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Nov 2005, $20.00
ISBN: 0374182396

A few years after WWI ended, a ship drops a young man on a tiny uninhabited island inside the Antarctic Circle. The male volunteered to serve as a weatherman for one year because he needed to escape those around him. The locale is so remote no one will ever come by until the ship returns to pick him up and his company insures him no one resides there.

However, the man is not where he is expected to be as his company is wrong about the local population. In the lighthouse live depressing hermit Gruner-German, who wants no one on his island including this outsider. When the human-like Sitauca pack attacks the lighthouse with endless fury, the two men form a grudging partnership that looks shaky even before both men hear the siren call of Aneris, the female of the enemy.

This is a terrific allegorical suspense thriller that grips the audience from the moment that the unnamed narrator is dumped on the ominous island. Readers will want to know who if any of the men survive. or. The story line is action-packed, but character driven with Gruner and the unnamed weatherman fully developed and their foes especially Aneris so genuine. Fans will want to read this dark Robin Crusoe like thriller.

Harriet Klausner