Books : Deep Fathom

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Rating:

- Another Rollins Hit
This book is similar to other James Rollins books in that it takes you all over the world to great environments, has a long lost civilization, and has a ton of action with a little bit of sci/fi to it. The book actually made me think at first that the TV show LOST had gotten it's idea from this book. The book starts off with a bang, has some very good character development with Kirkland fighting his past, and ties it all together in the end. Excellent read. I have read 4 James Rollins books so far and I would rate them in this order...Amazonia, Black Order, Deep Fathom, Sandstorm. They have all been excellent in their own way though.

Rating:

- All his books are great
After reading one of his books I had to read them all. He must have a research team to find out all the facts that go along with each subject as it is amazing to read each different book located in totally different locales. I buy each new one as soon as it is available.

Rating:

- Everything but the proverbial kitchen sink ... !
The first solar eclipse of the millennium and a series of intense solar flares have triggered a monumental series of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides and tsunamis around the entire circumference of the Pacific Ring of Fire. The cataclysmic forces unleashed by these violent events bring down Air Force One in the middle of the ocean killing the President of the USA and everyone else on board. (Uh oh ... we can smell a political crisis there, can't we!) Ex-Navy Seal, Jack Kirkland, is on board a deep sea submersible exploring a sunken Japanese vessel reputed to be carrying an enormous hoard of gold bullion when this series of inexplicable disasters shatter the earth's crust. Kirkland narrowly escapes death avoiding an undersea eruption and lava flow as the Japanese freighter is swallowed into the earth's crust before his very eyes.

Sounds very promising, doesn't it?

Well, I'll admit it. I thoroughly enjoy a well-written techno-thriller with lots of slam-bang action; pops and bangs, bells and whistles; boy-girl action; insufferably evil bad guys; and lots of Hollywood thrills, chills and heroics thrown in. I'm even willing to be a reading wimp and have my credibility pushed around by a bully-boy author who stretches things to the limit!

But "Deep Fathom" went way, way beyond those limits and pushed my belief meter well beyond the red zone and right off the scale.

Within the range of a brief 450 page novel, here are just a few of the things that Rollins would have you read about - nuclear war between the US and China; the solution to the cosmological problem of dark energy and dark matter; the translation of a hitherto entirely unknown ancient pictographic language by a computer artificial intelligence; the solution of the Bermuda Triangle mystery; time travel; amateur computer hackers hi-jacking an abandoned orbiting satellite and using it as a platform to fire particle weapons; the discovery of a Pacific equivalent to the lost civilization of Atlantis and a society of cut-throat warriors guarding these long hidden secrets; and (are you ready for this?) anti-gravity!

Even for a sci-fi novel of the space opera variety, this would be over the top but for a novel that bills itself as techno-thriller, it verges on laughable.

There is no doubt that Rollins has skill to create characters, suspense, action, dialogue and plot. But he's got to rein it in and avoid dumping it all into a single novel. He might even try a pure sci-fi novel. Now that just might fly!

Not recommended.

Paul Weiss

Rating:

- Awesome Read
Awesome fun read here. Keep me wanting more and more. Great action and suspense. This book reads very easily and the time just flies by.

Rating:

- Too much make believe
This is the second book of Rollins that I have read, I was hoping that it would be better then the first one, "Amazonia". I was wrong, follows same style, too much science fiction. The books are well written, and have some interesting parts that keep you interested, but the story line just gets too sci fi for my taste. I was given multiple Rollins books for Christmas, hopefully one will be a winner.

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