Books : Deep Fathom

In association with Amazon.com

Rating:

- Good Action-Adventure
If you like INDIANA JONES and other movies like THE ABYSS, this book is for you. It's one of Rollins' earlier books and you can tell. Some of the back story and the supporting characters are cliche and sometimes weak, but the premise is strong and always he keeps the pages turning with action-adventure, reversals, and new dangers. The secret underlying this story is absolutely great. Overall I'd give DEEP FATHOM three and a half stars out of five.

Rating:

- What an incredible book
Once you start reading it, you won't be able to set it down. I even got yelled at by my boss for reading the book on company time. I've read it 4 times and each time is like the first time. There is alot of information to process so get ready be blown away. It's awsome. Also, if you missed reading Tino Georgiou's masterpiece--The Fates, go and read it.

Rating:

- Thrilling book!! Great writer!!
This was the first noval written by James Rollins that I read. I loved it. It was so thrilling with lot's of action. When I finished reading it, I ordered copies from Amazon for my loved ones so they could enjoy reading this book too. Recently I finished reading Excavation, Subterranean, and Ice Hunt..all by James Rollins. Wow....they were fantastic! I have purchased all the other novals written by James Rollins and looking forward to reading them one after the other!!

Rating:

- Flawed but enjoyable
I read James Rollins's "Black Order"---a relatively recent book---before going back and reading "Deep Fathom." One of the things I most liked about "Black Order" was the characterization. Rollins showed great skill in painting characters with the briefest of brushstrokes, and his characters were interesting and engaging, from main characters to walk-on parts to even the nastiest of villains. I wanted to know what happened to them, good guys and bad guys alike. In "Deep Fathom" I can see the beginnings of these skills---the main characters and their allies are intriguing, interesting, and wonderfully fun to read about---but it's obvious that Rollins has improved since then as well.

Minor characters are drawn in every bit as quickly, but often not as skillfully, making it harder to care about their fates. In particular, the villains are extremely black-and-white, one-dimensional eeeevil bad guys, with little to make them compelling beyond their use to drive the plot and threaten the main characters. There's a brief attempt at giving depth to one of them---David Spangler, an old enemy of Jack's---by providing a few meager childhood explanations for his depravity, but depth really needs to come from depiction, not background. Not even that much thought is given to the vice president-now-president, who takes horrifying glee in the idea of starting a nuclear war without so much as a flicker of regret or second thought.

As usual, Rollins provides a high-tension thrill ride. It appears he's always had a great feel for action and pacing, and even on those occasions when I wasn't 100% on board with the story I was still pulled along and engrossed by it.

The story involves a fascinating archaeological mystery---was there once an entire continent that has now sunk beneath the waves of the Pacific Ocean? If so, what happened to it? How does Easter Island tie into it, and the Bermuda Triangle, and a mysterious pillar of crystal found jutting out of the ocean floor---with writing on it!

However, unlike Black Order, which despite some highly unusual plot points succeeded in causing me to suspend disbelief pretty much entirely, I had a little more trouble with that here. Partially I think that's because some events---particularly toward the climax of the book---wrapped up a bit too neatly and conveniently.

So is this book worth reading? Absolutely! It's a fun read with a fascinating plot, and just because Rollins has improved since then hardly means that you shouldn't go back and read his earlier work if you haven't already. Consider my rating a 3.5.

Rating:

- The Author's Books are Compelling Reading

James Rollins was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1961. With his three brothers and three sisters, he was raised in the Midwest and rural Canada. He graduated with a doctorate in veterinary medicine from the University of Missouri and went on to establish his own veterinary practice in Sacramento, California. His sense of adventure often takes him either underground or underwater.

This is the another action packed adventure from the author, whose books for me anyway are consistently good and always an enjoyable read. Long may he continue to write them for his growing number of fans. Some writers have an immediate impact and then die away. James Rollins has slowly built his reputation over a period of years, what you might call a slow burner, but all the better for it.

The new millennium's first eclipse of the sun, looked forward to by many people as a natural phenomenon rarely seen in the span of a human lifetime casts a shroud over the Earth. And then catastrophe struck . . .

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

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