Arctic Rising (Tobias Buckell)

The plot of this story was interesting and kept me turning pages. In the fairly near future, global warming has melted the ice caps and opened the entire arctic circle to settlement and shipping. Lots of groups are exploring and exploiting this region, including those who want to do things like dump various waste products. The UN has airships in the area watching for this, but one gets shot down, and its pilot barely survives. She finds herself hunted and threatened, and is nearly killed several more times as she tries to unravel the mystery of what's going on at the pole. With the help of various shady characters, she uncovers a nest of competing conspiracies between those fighting to save the world from ecological disaster and those who just want to exploit it, and it turns out that neither of these is really the good guy. Things are very exciting, but none of the characters ever felt very real to me, partly because the dialogue never rang true. A good thriller, though.