Sunday, August 26, 2007

Deep Fathom

Author: James Rollins
Published: July 2001 (HarperCollins)
Category: Thriller
Rating: 7/10

I read this on a recommendation from a comment left after I reviewed Rollins' Map of Bones. I liked Deep Fathom more than MOB because it was less confusing and the science was more believable. The only confusing part was once incidence of time travel, where certain parts stayed the same and the rest of the world jumped backward in time depending on the proximity to ground zero.

On The Day Everything Changed Forever...

The millennium's first eclipse of the sun cast a shroud over the Earth. And then catastrophe struck...

On The Day The End Began...

Solar flares have triggered a series of gargantuan natural disasters. Earthquakes and hellfire rock the globe. The death toll rises at an unimaginable rate. And in the midst of chaos, Air Force One and America's president have vanished from the skies.

The Sea Revealed A Mystery

Ex-Navy Seal Jack Kirkland surfaces from an aborted underwater salvage mission to find the Earth burning -- and the U.S. on the narrow brink of a nuclear apocalypse. Now, aboard his oceangoing exploration ship, Deep Fathom, Kirkland is on a desperate mission that is leading him to an earth-shattering discovery miles below the ocean's surface. For devastating secrets and a power an ancient civilization could not contain have been cast out into a modern day -- and they will forever alter a world racing toward its own destruction.

I don't have much to say, since this is another of my "doing the review two weeks after finishing the book" posts. I enjoyed it, and it's definitely a more manly book. The action is well paced, unlike Map of Bones, where it felt like action took the place of actual plot development. I really enjoyed the imagined lost continent under the Pacific Ocean, and the idea of a second set of Poles (one in the center of the Bermuda Triangle and the other in its Pacific counterpart).

The crappiest part of the book? The Aryan secret commando promoting the agenda of the evil vice president who's taking advantage of the natural disaster to start a war with China. He was insane and had this tunnel vision for killing Jack because of events that occurred a dozen years ago (Jack was selected for a trip to space over him). Whenever he was the focus, I kept saying, "Come on and die already!" Not a very good villain.

1 comment:

Kailana said...

Not my favourite Rollins, but I like his standalones better than Sigma, but apparently his Sigma series sells better. One of the characters from this book will be in The Judas Strain. I am thinking I might have been the person that recommended you read this, but I can't remember...