The Abominable is an epic ripping Boy's Own yarn of adventures and peril and derring-do in the Himalayas. That's what it turns out to be, at any rate, though it plays a few clever games of misdirection and sleight-of-hand with reader expectations. Those familiar with previous epic historical yarns, Drood and The Terror will be primed neither to take anything at face value nor to be sure what to expect around the next glacier.

Our hero is Jake Perry, callow young American graduate tooling around the Alps with two new-found friends, one English, one French. At the summit of the Matterhorn, upon reading their sandwich wrapping, they hear the news that Mallory and Irvine have vanished on Everest, along with two others not part of the Mallory expedition. The news prompts the Englishman, Deacon, to seek funding from a grieving mother to go to Everest and search for a missing body, though the real purpose for the three climbers will be the summit of Everest itself.

There follows and extended period of preparation and investigation, priming both the characters and the readers with equipment and information for the coming climb. Simmons takes a science-fiction writer's delight in the technological advances that will make the climb possible while familiarising the reader with the language and techniques that will be employed in the Himalayas. Meanwhile, mystery surrounds the deaths of the other two climbers, and an unwelcome cousin could threaten to derail the whole exercise. At last, the mountain is reached and the search begins, but as has already been intimated by the book blurb, events are due to take a dark and bloody turn.

Despite the lengthy preamble before the action begins, this is a pacy, lively, fascinating tale, and when the action truly starts it never lets up. The book does play a trick on the reader, and it might annoy some, but I thought it was clever and there was a point to it. If I have any real reservations, it's to do with the bloody fate of the native redshirts, an aspect of colonial adventure fiction which Simmons doesn't manage to subvert as well as he does other, similar aspects. Which is a flaw in an otherwise hugely entertaining book.