Whiteout

'Everyone likes a page-turner, and Follett is the best.'—The Philadelphia Inquirer'A hell of a storyteller'(Entertainment Weekly), #1 New York Times bestselling author Ken Follett reinvents the thriller with each new novel. But nothing matches the intricate knife-edge drama of Whiteout.... A missing canister of a deadly virus. A lab technician bleeding from the eyes. Toni Gallo, the security director of a Scottish medical research firm, knows she has problems, but she has no idea of the nightmare to come. As a Christmas Eve blizzard whips out of the north, several people, Toni among them, converge on a remote family house. All have something to gain or lose from the drug developed to fight the virus. As the storm worsens, the emotional sparks—jealousies, distrust, sexual attraction, rivalries—crackle; desperate secrets are revealed; hidden traitors and unexpected heroes emerge. Filled with startling twists at every turn, Whiteout rockets Follett into a class by himself. A missing canister of a deadly virus. A lab technician bleeding from the eyes. Toni Gallo, the security director of a Scottish medical research firm, knows she has problems, but she has no idea of the nightmare to come. As a Christmas Eve blizzard whips out of the north, several people converge on a remote family house. Stanley Oxenford, the research company’s director, has everything riding on the drug he is developing to fight the virus – but he isn’t the only one: His grown children, who have come to spend Christmas, have their eyes on the money it will bring. Toni Gallo, forced to resign from the police department in disgrace, is betting her career on keeping the drug safe; a local television reporter, determined to move up, has sniffed the story, even if he has to bend the facts to tell it; and a violent trio of thugs is on its way to steal it for a client already waiting – though what the client really has in mind is something that will shock them all. As the storm worsens, the emotional sparks – jealousies, distrust, sexual attraction, rivalries – crackle; desperate secrets are revealed; hidden traitors and unexpected heroes emerge... A Scottish medical research firm specializing in vaccines and treatments for deadly viruses is robbed. Kit Oxenford, son of the firm's director, is desperate to pay off his illegal gambling debts and anxious to revenge himself on the father who fired him for embezzlement. So he helps thieves circumvent the company's elaborate security system, believing that they intend to steal an experimental drug and sell it to a rival pharmaceutical company. Unfortunately, their scheme is considerably more sinister than that, and when the heist doesn't go exactly as planned, it leads to a devastating confrontation at the snowed-in Oxenford family estate A missing canister containing a deadly virus forms the center of a storm that traps Stanley Oxenford, director of a medical research firm, and a violent trio of thugs in a remote house during a Christmas Eve blizzard