This tenth installment to the Dirk Pitt series by Clive Cussler is one of those great stories that gets lost in time. The plot to this one is fairly clean (if not a little unbelievable), and the characters are well-drawn and full-bodied.

In this tale, a Japanese business tycoon—virtually godlike in his Shinto culture—seeks to bring America to its knees by threatening nuclear devastation, unless the nation sells her economic soul to The Rising Sun. Meanwhile, while surveying the ocean depths from a secret observatory dubbed “Soggy Acres”, the great Dirk Pitt gets inadvertently slapped by the tycoon’s first nuclear blast and thereafter seeks personal vengeance against whomever was responsible. From this point onward, the table’s set for a showdown of epic proportions—a Cussler signature—this time resulting in Pitt murdering the tycoon with the greatest fury nature has to offer (it’s not a spoiler to note that the good guy beats the bad guy, is it?).

I enjoyed the story in this one, as it maintained a modicum of believability. Nuclear threats are normal, though blasting two bombs inside one novel might be pushing it. What really threw me was the end of Part III, though, after Dirk Pitt killed the samurai assassin and kidnapped the villain. I figured the story had been all cleared up: the book is over, right? Not by a long shot. Had I been reading the story in paperback form, I would have noticed the thickness of the remaining chapters. As it was, however, I was listening to the audio book (thank you, Michael Prichard) and couldn’t tell just how much story was left. I felt drag during the remaining chapters but kept plugging away, and the end of the book offered a unique twist to the life of Dirk Pitt.

One thing that really bugs me about this novel, despite all its other charms, was a throwaway sentence near the end about an American plane filled with tourists that was shot down by the Cuban military. “Wait, WHAT!?”

Wasn’t it just two books ago in Cyclops that Cuba and the US became allies? Didn’t Castro speak to Congress not too long ago? What in the world is our island sister to the south doing shooting down a plane of tourists? And without any explanation!? I was a bit flummoxed by this, even though I know that authors of silly adventure novels oughtn’t be expected to maintain common sense throughout all their made-up worlds. But still: if Sandecker’s Havana cigars are still legal, then Castor shouldn’t be murdering American citizens wholesale. That should be a rule.

But of course, that’s just one reader’s opinion. We’ll see if Dirk Pitt’s next adventure, Sahara, can help me forget the incongruities at all.

©2017 E.T.

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