Trojan odyssey

Review by Booklist Review

The latest Dirk Pitt thriller, like its 16 predecessors, is ready made for the big screen. (Let's hope it makes a better movie than 1980's Raise the Titanic, also based on a Pitt adventure, which gives you some idea of how long the series has been around.) A hurricane threatens an undersea resort hotel; meanwhile, Dirk Pitt's twin offspring are trapped at the bottom of the ocean in Pisces, an underwater laboratory. Oh, and Dirk himself swoops in to rescue the hotel, and its guests--but what about his children? Cussler has written a lot of seabound thrillers, and he clearly knows how to put one together to get maximum excitement from minimal material. Everything is done in shorthand, from the disaster-movie-plot setup to the characters and dialogue. There's the evil-named Specter, the man behind the hotel, with a heart of cold stone. There are the twins, whose dialogue sounds like it was lifted from a Hardy Boys novel (I want to take a closer look inside the cavern where I found the urn. Can you find it in the dark? Like a fox to its lair ). In a nutshell, this novel offers precisely what readers have come to expect from a Dirk Pitt adventure: danger, heroics, villains, heroes. --David Pitt Copyright 2003 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Adventure tales for boys (and girls) of all ages have no more vigorous champion today than Cussler, who has kept the spirit of Joe and Frank Hardy alive, albeit on a grander scale, in numerous bestsellers. This 17th Dirk Pitt extravaganza finds Cussler (literally, as he makes a cameo at book's end) and his entourage of paint-by-number characters in fine fettle, foiling a dastardly plot by outlandish villains to launch a new ice age, and at the same time demonstrating that the Achaeans were not Greeks but Celts, and that Troy was a town in what's now England. After a prelude set during the Trojan War, the novel proper starts with a roar, as a monstrous hurricane sweeps toward the Caribbean, endangering not only Pitt's twin son and daughter, engaged in undersea exploration, but also the Ocean Wanderer, a luxury floating hotel owned by a mysterious billionaire known as Specter. In a manly manner, Pitt and his longtime sidekick, Al Giordino, both of NUMA (the National Underwater and Marine Agency), save the hotel and Pitt's grown kids, but not before those kids discover a trove of underwater relics that indicate that the Celts, aka Achaeans, reached the New World millennia ago. And the Celts are still here, in the guise of a female Druidic cult linked to Specter and aiming for world domination by altering ocean currents via a vast underground mechanism in Nicaragua, which will plunge the earth into cold, then selling a new type of cheap fuel cell to supply needed heat. The action never flags, the heroics never halt and the bodies pile up as Pitt and Co. take on the villains; some big changes in Pitt's personal life close the book. Cussler's legions of fans are going to march into bookstores the day this title appears; expect whopping sales. 750,000 first printing; $750,000 ad/promo. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

For the past 20 years or so, Cussler has produced one old-fashioned melodrama after another featuring the heroic Dirk Pitt and his faithful sidekick, Al Giordino. These novels are comfortably familiar: they begin with a story from the past (in this case, the Trojan War), switch to a modern-day megalomaniac determined to take over the world, and then place Dirk and Al in several "how-will-they-ever-get-out-of-this" situations that stimulate listeners' imaginations. Reader Scott Brick captures perfectly the blend of suspense and humor; his ability to verbalize the banter between Dirk and Al as they find themselves in adventure after adventure adds greatly to the enjoyment of this latest classic. For all public libraries.-Joseph L. Carlson, Allan Hancock Coll., Lompoc, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Clive the Mighty has found a formula for his terrific escapist plots and sees no reason to alter it. Introductory historical diversions seemingly have no tie to the story--and yet a solar boat from ancient Egypt or a recovered Viking vessel may explain why a modern luxury liner that runs on seawater gets sunk by international villains, as in Valhalla Rising (2001). At the end of Valhalla, the faintly aging Dirk finds that he has two children by a long-dead lover: the 23-year-old fraternal twins Summer, now a marine biologist, and Dirk, a marine engineer, both waterfolk like himself and ready to join him in his NUMA (National Underwater Maritime Administration) adventures. Things open with a brilliantly detailed description of the fall of Troy, turning mere legend about the wooden horse into matters of engineering, and filling the reader's mind with Homeric facts to be recalled later. Cusslerian historical mystery: young Summer Pitt, spending ten days with Dirk Jr. in an underwater lab off the Navidad Bank of the Dominican Republic while investigating a horrible brown muck that's killing coral and fish, finds a sunken Bronze Age amphor determined to be from Gaul, about 3,000 years old, with encrustation proving that it landed on this very sea-bottom Way Back Then. Impossible! But then Summer and Dirk find an underwater ghost temple. Instead of an imperiled luxury liner, Cussler erects nearby the supremely luxurious Ocean Wanderer--a floating underwater resort hotel--which is hit by Hurricane Lizzie, an axe-wielding storm with 100-foot waves and winds of 250 mph. Can NUMA's Sea Sprite evacuate 1,100 souls from the hotel? And Dirk and Summer, running out of air, need rescuing as well! Plus, what's this spreading killer muck? It will take Dirk Sr. himself and sidekick Al Giordino to unmask the roly-poly villain Specter, save Summer from the Homeric Amazon priestesses who want to sacrifice her, and explain Specter's secret tunnels under Nicaragua. Hurricane Clive at his most tumultuous. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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August 15, 2006 KEY WEST, FLORIDA Dr. Heidi Lisherness was about to meet her husband for a night out on the town when she took one last cursory glance at the latest imagery collected by a Super Rapid Scan Operations satellite. A full-figured lady with silver-gray hair pulled back in a bun, Heidi sat at her desk in green shorts and matching top as a measure of comfort against the heat and humidity of Florida in August. She came within a hair of simply shutting down her computer until the following morning. But there was an indiscernible something about the last image that came into her computer from the satellite over the Atlantic Ocean southwest of the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa. She sat down and gazed more intently into the screen of her monitor. To the untrained eye the picture on the screen simply took on the appearance of a few innocent clouds drifting over an azure blue sea. Heidi saw a view more menacing. She compared the image with one taken only two hours earlier. The mass of cumulus clouds had increased in bulk more rapidly than any spawning storm she could remember in her eighteen years monitoring and forecasting tropical hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean with the National Underwater and Marine Agency Hurricane Center. She began enlarging the two images of the infant storm formation. Her husband, Harley, a jolly-looking man with a walrus mustache, bald head and wearing rimless glasses, stepped into her office with an impatient look on his face. Harley was also a meteorologist. But he worked for the National Weather Service as an analyst on climatological data that was issued as weather advisories for commercial and private aircraft, boats and ships at sea. "What's keeping you?" he said, pointing impatiently at his watch. "I have reservations at the Crab Pot." Without looking up, she motioned at the two side-by-side images on her computer. "These were taken two hours apart. Tell me what you see." Harley examined them for a long moment. Then his brow furrowed and he repositioned his glasses before leaning closer for a more in-depth look. Finally, he looked at his wife and nodded. "One hell of a fast buildup." "Too fast," said Heidi. "If it continues at the same rate, God only knows how huge a storm it will brew." "You never know," said Harley thoughtfully. "She might come in like a lion and go out like a lamb. It's happened." "True, but most storms take days, sometimes weeks, to build to this strength. This has mushroomed within hours." "Too early to predict her direction or where she'll peak and do the most damage." "I have a dire feeling this one will be unpredictable." Harley smiled. "You will keep me informed as she builds?" "The National Weather Service will be the first to know," she said, lightly slapping him on the arm. "Thought of a name for your new friend yet?" "If she becomes as nasty as I think she might, I'll call her Lizzie, after the ax murderess Lizzie Borden." "A bit early in the season for a name beginning with L but it sounds fitting." Harley handed his wife her purse. "Time enough tomorrow to see what develops. I'm starved. Let's go eat some crab." Heidi dutifully followed her husband from her office, switching off the light and closing the door. But the growing apprehension did not diminish as she slid into the seat of their car. Her mind wasn't on food. It dwelled on what she feared was a hurricane in the making that might very well reach horrendous proportions. A hurricane is a hurricane by any other name in the Atlantic Ocean. But not in the Pacific, where it is called a typhoon, nor the Indian, where it is known as a cyclone. A hurricane is the most horrendous force of nature, often exceeding the havoc caused by volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, creating destruction over a far larger territory. Like the birth of a human or animal, a hurricane requires an array of related circumstances. First, the tropical waters off the west coast of Africa are heated, preferably with temperatures exceeding eighty degrees Fahrenheit. Then, bake the water with the sun, causing vast amounts to evaporate into the atmosphere. This moisture rises into cooler air and condenses into masses of cumulus clouds while giving birth to wide-ranging rain and thunderstorms. This combination provides the heat that fuels the growing tempest and transforms it from infancy to puberty. Now stir in spiraling air that whips around at speeds up to thirty-eight miles an hour, or thirty-three knots. These growing winds cause the surface air pressure to drop. The lower the drop the more intense the wind circulation as it whirls around in an ever-faster momentum until it forms a vortex. Feeding on the ingredients, the system, as it is called by meteorologists, has created an explosive centrifugal force that spins a solid wall of wind and rain around the eye that is amazingly calm. Inside the eye, the sun shines, the sea lies relatively calm and the only sign of the horrendous energy are the surrounding white frenzied walls reaching fifty thousand feet into the sky. Until now, the system has been called a tropical depression, but once the winds hit 74 miles an hour it becomes a full-fledged hurricane. Then, depending on the wind velocities it puts out, it is given a scale number. Winds between 74 and 95 miles an hour is a Category 1 and considered minimal. Category 2 is moderate with winds up to 110. Category 3 blows from 111 to 130 and is listed as extensive. Winds up to 155 are extreme, as was Hurricane Hugo that eliminated most of the beach houses north of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1989. And finally, the granddaddy of them all, Category 5 with winds 155-plus. The last is labeled catastrophic, as was Hurricane Camille, which struck Louisiana and Mississippi in 1969. Camille left 256 dead in her wake, a drop in the bucket as compared to the 8,000 who perished in the great hurricane of 1900 that laid complete waste to Galveston, Texas. In terms of sheer numbers, the record is held by the 1970 tropical cyclone that stormed ashore in Bangladesh and left nearly half a million dead. In terms of damage, the great hurricane of 1926 that devastated Southeast Florida and Alabama left a bill totaling $83 billion, allowing for inflation. Amazingly, only two hundred and forty-three died in that catastrophe. What no one was counting on, including Heidi Lisherness, was that Hurricane Lizzie had a diabolic mind of her own and her coming fury was about to put the previous recorded Atlantic hurricanes to shame. In a short time, after bulking up on muscle, she would begin her murderous journey toward the Caribbean Sea to wreak chaos and havoc on everything she touched. --from Trojan Odyssey: A Dirk Pitt Novel by Clive Cussler, copyright © 2003 Clive Cussler, published by G.P. Putnam's Sons, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., all rights reserved, reprinted with permission from the publisher. Excerpted from Trojan Odyssey by Clive Cussler All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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