One of the unwritten rules of creating a good horror yarn is that the location your story takes place in has to be as frightening as your monster. The setting almost has to act an an extension of the bloodthirsty antagonist; a place that can more easily be seen as its lair than a place of human habitation. In Lincoln Child's latest novel Terminal Freeze that place is Fear Base, a rotting military facility shivering the the shadow of Fear Glacier, and it is stalked by something utterly horrifying.

Readers of The Relic, another horror novel penned by Child and his sometimes partner Douglas Preston, will feel right at home as they delve into Terminal Freeze. Fear Base is a dusty, dark, and labyrinthine place just as foreboding as the natural history museum in which Preston and Child's first hit novel was set. (Child's choice of setting also closely recalls that of John Carpenter's The Thing, based on the short story "Who Goes There?") A further similarity to the earlier work is that the story follows a diverse group of characters with a scientist, in this case paleoecologist Evan Marshall, as the hero.

The basic storyline is as follows; a group of scientists discover something frozen in the ice, a creature with two predatory, cat-like eyes. At first they think it is a Smilodon frozen in ice, but as more information comes to light they are less sure of their initial hypothesis. Such a momentous discovery soon grabs the attention of the people who underwrote the expedition, the Terra Prime documentary network, and soon the scientists are sidelined as the film crew turns the base into a media circus. . . .