| Exerpt: |
| “Something squeaked. Not the baby yeti as he had first thought, but a smaller creature, about twenty inches long, covered with thick fur and with a distinctive squat build. It was a Himalayan marmot. One of the pendulously breasted yeti females was holding the creature in her hand. An absurd idea that this might be some kind of pet was immediately rejected when the female took the squeaking marmot by the leg and, wielding it like a slingshot, banged it hard against the side of a tree, killing it instantly. For a moment she seemed to examine the marmot's stomach fur until Jack saw the blood on her strong fingers and realized that she had disemboweled it and was now eating the innards. Her meal over, the female yeti flung away the gutted furry carcass as if it had been an empty candy wrapper. A vague memory of the eviscerated marmot they had seen on top of the Rognon, and of an article in National Geographic devoted to a group of meat-eating chimpanzees, was quickly replaced by a sense of dread as to the meaning of the yeti sign language. Dread turned to horror as Number One ripped the control panel off the front of Jack's SCE suit and started to chew at it experimentally. The yetis were carnivores. They were planning to eat him. And to eat him alive.” |
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| Reviews: |
| "Fascinating … A high-altitude, high-stakes search for the yeti, the so-called Abominable Snowman." (The New York Times Book Review) |
| "… The daredevil feats of the mountaineers, the impossible cold and the endless miles of glacier and snow in the little-visited Annapurna Sanctuary make this novel a marvelous armchair travelogue, but it's far more: a complicated yet visceral thriller in which monsters, human and otherwise, roam the earth and hunt each other. Convincing scientific and technological detail will have readers believing easily in yetis and other wonders of the world's highest mountains; they will even forgive the unabashed sentimentality of the ending. Kerr manages his large cast of characters with a sure hand, while the plot gathers speed and power like a Himalayan avalanche." (Publisher's Weekly) |
| "Philip Kerr, who has been dubbed 'Michael Crichton's smarter brother', brings us Esau, the thinking man's technothriller that swirls around the discovery of a missing link in the Himalayas … Once you start, you can't stop." (Playboy) |
| "brilliant … A thriller in the grand tradition. (Denver Post) |
| "Gripping … Exciting." (Philadelphia Inquirer) |
| "Kerr, whose last thriller (The Grid, 1995) recalled Michael Crichton at his slickest, far outstrips his model in this mix of Himalaya derring-do with a breathtakingly well-informed command of mountain-climbing hardware, primate biology, and philosophical speculations on the riddles of evolution." (Kirkus Reviews) |
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