ATLANTIS FOUND

Dirk Pitt returns in his first undersea adventure since Flood Tide (1997). Also returning, regrettably, are most of the literary failings Cussler seemed to have vanquished with the help of coauthor Paul Kemprecos in his recent non-Pitt thriller, the smooth and surprisingly poetic Serpent: From the NUMA Files (p. 752). Atlantis Found, by contrast, has a boiler-room’s worth of grammatical clinkers and a cast of characters whose credibility is’shall we be polite?—tenuous. Cussler, however, knows how to distract us from bad prose and ludicrous protagonists with lots of maritime facts, albeit many of them imaginary. He begins splendidly here, with a comet wiping out nearly all human life 7,000 years ago, shifting the tectonic plates, bringing on the second Ice Age, and leading to the sinking of Atlantis in Antarctica. Dirk Pitt, naturally, rediscovers the lost island while, in a second plotline, undercover Nazis reappear with hopes of establishing the Fourth Reich. Need we mention that Pitt’s longstanding love affair with dazzling, cinnamon-haired Loren Smith reignites? Cussler fans will have no complaint as the Master revs up his novel to 40 knots per hour and sweeps the reader into the fabled past.