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the complete review - fiction

Tanner on Ice

by
Lawrence Block

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : good, light fun

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Even when the fantasy wears thin and the scenery looks like cheesy pasteboard, Block's inventive wit still delights. The whole thing is silly, but yes, it is fun." - Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Tanner on Ice is fun, fast, and fresh; totally implausible but utterly absorbing; light-hearted but shot through with a thoughtful, even sober, moral vision. It is not Block's best novel but it is nevertheless very good, for Block is a consistently winning storyteller, and a gifted writer. His work overflows with confidence and energy. He is always concise, always clear. His prose is clean, sharp and beautifully edgy, with an intimacy that stems from the fact that hero and narrator are one. (...) Despite having an exquisite sense of suspense, Block never wastes time." - Mary Loudon, The Times
  
  
• "His escape from Burma draws inspiration from both the chase scenes in Eric Ambler's classic spy thrillers and the old Hope and Crosby road movies. In Tanner on Ice Block not only takes one of his most entertaining protagonists out of deep freeze but also scrapes the ice crystals off the neglected subgenre of the espionage caper tale." - Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Lawrence Block published seven novels featuring Evan Tanner between 1966 and 1970, but then put the character on ice and only again resurrected him in this novel, published in 1998. In doing so he faced a dilemma: born in 1933, by the late 1990s Tanner would already be in his sixties -- getting to be kind of old to play the active role he had in those earlier novels. Block could have set the novel back in the early 1970s, continuing Tanner's adventures back then -- or age his protagonist in a contemporary setting .....
       Block did neither, having it both ways with a preposterous explanation: Tanner on Ice sees Tanner having literally been put on ice -- cryogenically frozen -- in 1972 and thawed out in the spring of 1997. He's perfectly preserved and functioning -- well, there's a lingering cold feeling at the core --, and none the worse for lack of wear and so, while technically sixty-four, he feels and looks like he is still thirty-nine here. (The whole thing is, of course, completely ridiculous, but the explanation of how and why he wound up frozen stiff, rather than just as a stiff is reasonably amusing.)
       Tanner has already been presented as an unusual specimen in the earlier novels: a war wound he sustained in Korea renders him not needing or being able to sleep, so he's awake 24/7; among the things he did in all that extra time he found himself with was study languages, which is why he speaks quite a few. The deep-freeze did nothing to change this particular physiological trait.
       Pretty much as soon as he is revived Tanner takes off from the hospital -- though you'd think both medical experts and some authorities would have a great interest in keeping a closer eye on him ... -- and heads back to his apartment. Sure, he realizes it's unlikely that it's still his apartment, or that it's even there at all, but, hey, it's worth a try. Among what he left in the apartment was also Minna, the then not quite eleven-year-old girl he had brought with him from then-still-very-Soviet Lithuania when she was six in an earlier adventure, and who had lived with him since.
       Conveniently -- lots of things in this novel are convenient; it certainly helps keep things moving --, the apartment is still there, and in his name; Minna proved a very plucky young girl and held onto it and did well for herself. More problematically, she is now a full-grown, very attractive woman, and that makes for new challenges when they again cohabitate -- which they do, since Minna, while a bit surprised to see Tanner, readily adapts to the situation.
       There's some fun in Tanner getting up to speed with what happened during the time he missed -- not least with computers and the internet (doubly amusing, too, to read another quarter of a century later, when things have changed yet again quite a bit ...).
       After some six months, Tanner is offered an assignment -- to go to Burma (then already Myanmar -- "But no one outside the government calls it that"). There's an interest in shaking things up, specifically with a change in government -- and an idea as to how to set that in motion; Tanner is to go there and pull the trigger, so to speak.
       Most of Tanner on Ice then sees Tanner in Burma -- scoping out his assignment (while never really planning to go through with it) but immediately also finding himself the focus of an awful lot of attention. Early on, a message is already delivered to him, telling him: "Get out of Burma or you die", which he takes for a threat but then also realizes could be a warning, and things continue in that vein: on the one hand, there are obviously people out to set him up and/or get him -- but he is also leant helping hands all along the way. Also along the way he picks up another waif, Katya, with quite the backstory too; she's desperate to get out of Burma and Tanner takes her along when he makes a run for it on his long escape.
       Block does the Burmese color and locale well -- he gets the places and details right -- and though the adventure and conspiracies are a bit convoluted, it's an enjoyable enough fast-paced ride. The consequences of eating durian in your hotel room, the threat of malaria, Buddhist practices in Burma, and the Shan and their fight against SLORC are among the many things woven more or less effortlessly into the story -- and the little absurd elements, from Tanner's dethawing to his doing without sleep to the backgrounds of Minna and Katya, though all quite unbelievable, fit well to the overall tone and feel of the novel.
       Good pass-time reading, and a fun, strange little ride.

- M.A.Orthofer, 27 July 2026

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Links:

• Harper publicity page
• Seuil publicity page

• Gumshoe
• Kirkus Reviews
• Pol'Art Noir (French)
• Publishers Weekly
• Pulp, Crime, & Mystery Books
• The Washington Post

• Official site

• See Index of Mysteries and Thrillers
• See Index of Contemporary American fiction
• See Index of Travel-related books
• See Index of books from and about Burma (Myanmar)

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About the Author:

       American author Lawrence Block was born in 1938.

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© 2026 the complete review

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