About reading

The book I have chosen is called “Night without end”. This book was written by Alistair Maclean and is a thriller novel published in 1959. Specifically, the edition I have read is a retold for students by Margaret Naudi. This novel is “considered one of MacLean´s very best”.

The main characters are three men: Peter Mason, Jackstraw and Joss. They were working in a weather station in the Arctic when suddenly, they heard a huge noise. They left the weather station to know what had happened. They found out that the noise had been an accident of a plane. When they reached the plane, they fortunately found ten survivors, but they also found several dead men but with one of them dead by a bullet not the crash, so it was clear that there were some murderers among all of them.

The rest of the story runs on trying to guess who is or are the murderers. Peter Mason, Jackstraw and Joss are men who are experienced in working in extreme conditions, but they have never managed a situation as described in the book. The leader of the three is Peter Mason, who, with the help of his two fellow workers, will try to find out what is happening and why a plane appears in the middle of the Arctic. At the end, they get to know that there were two murderers who forced the pilots of the plane to land in the ice-cap because in the plane there was a top secret guided-missile mechanism which is valued about a million pounds.

The rest of characters (the survivors) are secondary characters (Corazzini, Marie Legarde, the boxer…), and the writer does not describe them in detail.

In my opinion, the story is really good and has been fast and easy to read because you want to know what is happening and who the murderers are from start to finish, something typical of the thriller genre, but the writer hides it until the end, so you read and read and this is done very fast.

On the other hand, I think that the writer should be slower with the changes between one setting and another, because in some situations the reader is in the plane but suddenly, in the next line, the story continues in the shelter.

In general terms, I liked the book and would recommend it to other students.

I have only read this book of Alistair MacLean, but I have been searching some information on the internet about him and he was (he is dead) a specialist in the thriller genre, so I would read other books by this author because the thrillers are my favorite books and films, but honestly, I see more movies than I read books.

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