Cussler, writing with his son, once again blends history, technical knowledge, bombs, bullets and betrayal into cinematic...
Mix terrorists, Roman artifacts, delusions of dynasty and irrefutable physical evidence that Jesus of Nazareth lived, then add water—from the Mediterranean Sea—and you get another aquatic adventure starring Dirk Pitt and his colleagues at NUMA.
This is Cussler's 21st effort with Pitt and the National Underwater and Marine Agency (Arctic Drift, 2008, etc.). While studying algae blooms in the Aegean Sea, the intrepid explorer stumbles upon an Ottoman Empire era shipwreck, among which there are Roman artifacts. Pitt takes his find to his friend Dr. Rey Ruppé at the Istanbul Archeology Museum hoping to discover why a medieval ship would have been carrying Roman-Christian era cargo, and the nonstop action begins. There is a cast of familiar characters, including Al Giordino, Pitt's twin children, Summer and Dirk Jr., all complemented by a crew of memorable villains, including Ozden Celik and his sister, Maria, the last direct descendants of the Ottoman dynasty. That pair is in possession of black-market HMX explosives and are intent on starting a revolution. Readers also meet assorted allied Arab terrorists, traders in purloined antiquities and a too-easily-forgiven rogue archeologist named Ridley Bannister. The 100 chapters sail by rapidly when Cussler brings in the legendary Lord Kitchener, drowned in 1916 when the British warship HMS Hampshire sinks while on a mission to Russia, Helena, the mother Emperor Constantine, a nearly perfectly preserved Roman galley in a cave on Cyprus, and a letter from Jesus to Peter. The complicated plot has the most nefarious villains dead by chapter 84. Dirk Pitt fans will be happy to note the appearance of the obligatory auto, this time a 1948 Model 135 Delahaye convertible coupe with a Henri Chapron coachwork-body.
Cussler, writing with his son, once again blends history, technical knowledge, bombs, bullets and betrayal into cinematic action.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-399-15714-1
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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