Deception Point

Senator Sedgewick Sexton is close to winning the presidency by attacking the space agency's wasted billions. Then the sitting President makes an announcement that could turn the election around: NASA has found a huge meteorite buried in the ice of the Arctic, and inside it are fossils of creatures from beyond Earth. To make sure the find is real, he sends Rachel Sexton, the senator's own daughter and a skilled analyst at the National Reconnaissance Office, to the remote site.

On the ice shelf Rachel joins a group of civilian scientists, among them the television oceanographer Michael Tolland. The evidence looks perfect at first, but small details do not fit, and when she starts asking questions, an elite military squad sets out to silence everyone who might expose the truth. What follows is a chase across glaciers, through a storm and out onto the open sea, while in Washington the senator, his ambitious assistant and the President's advisers fight their own political battle over the discovery.

Pure page-turner pleasure, lighter on history than Robert Langdon's adventures and heavier on science and technology. Around 752 pages in the mass-market paperback.