As an aspiring scuba diver, I wanted to find a book that dealt with mysteries and scuba diving. One series I found was that featuring police diver Hanna Sampson, who appears in:
1. Swimming with the Dead (2003)
2. Dark Water Dive (2004)
3. Dangerous Depths (2005)
4. Under Pressure (2006)
Dangerous Depths takes place in the British Virgin Islands.
From Wikipedia: The British Virgin Islands consist of the main islands of Tortola, Virgin Gorda, Anegada and Jost Van Dyke, along with over fifty other smaller islands and cays. Approximately fifteen of the islands are inhabited. The capital, Road Town, is situated on Tortola, the largest island which is approximately 20 km (12 mi) long and 5 km (3 mi) wide. The islands have a total population of about 22,000, of whom approximately 18,000 live on Tortola.
I include this information because it isn't given in the book. A few of Brandt's characters speak with an island accent, but other than that the reader doesn't really get the feel of being in the British Virgin Islands, for all that there's plenty of investigating underwater going on.
Hannah Sampson is a police diver who comes to the British Virgin Islands to escape from her life in Denver:
I'd first come to the islands on a special assignment, investigating the death of the Denver police commissioner's son, a scientist doing research in the BVI. He'd disappeared while out diving only to be found seventy feet under the water, just off the coast of Tortola, trapped inside a wreck, dive tank empty. The commissionwer had been devastated wanted one of his own people in the Denver PD and an experienced diver checking things out. He'd sent me.
After I'd apprehended the killers, John Dunn, the chief of Tortola police, had asked me to stay and offered me a job, and I'd decided to give it a try. He needed a diver and underwater investigator on his team, and I needed to get away.
Hannah lives on a boat called the Sea Bird. At midnight, she is waked by an explosion and runs on deck to see her friend, Elyse Henry's boat, on fire. Hannah dives into the water to save her friend, who later ends up in hospital in critical condition.
Her police captain believes the explosion was an accident - Elyse must have had a faulty stove on board - but Hannah believes it was attempted murder, and she sets out to investigate Elyse's movements in the last few weeks, to see if someone has a motive for her death.
And she finds one, in men who dislike Elyse's environmental work to save the endangered green sea turtle. But does their dislike extend to murder?
Truth to tell, I'm ambivalent about the book. The mystery is excellent, but it is hard to wade through the writing. (No pun intended.)
Many authors write so well that one loses oneself in the book, eventually unaware one is even reading. Others don't do so well - among them Clive Cussler and Kathy Brandt (although Brandt's grasp of the language is better than Cussler's!) But so much detail is given that it takes one right out of the story.
Here are a few paragraphs:
"Yeah. I'll tell you what though - it's a much nicer job in the crystal waters of the tropics. Back in the States I was retrieving bodies from icy lakes and brown polluted water. Mostly, diving blond. I'll take this any day."
We were quiet for the rest of the ride and I found myself thinking about the diving I had done in the States. And I thought about losing Jake. He'd been the team leader. It had been a frigid January morning, and we'd been on assignment, diving for a body in an alpine lake.
We'd bagged the body and taken it to the surface, then returned to examine and collect evidence. We were on our way back to the surface when I turned to make sure Jake was behind me. He wasn't. I went back, frantic, searching for him in the dark, icy water. By the time I got to the surface, I was hypothermic and out of air. The team found his body the next day.
Jake and I had lived together for over a year and had finally decided to make the big commitment. The wedding was to be that weekend. Instead, I'd ended up standing in the cemetery, watching the snow falling on his casket. I hadn't heard what the minister said that day. I made a promise back then never to get that close again. It hurt way too much.
and here's an underwater description:
We descended slowly. Every few feet, I pinched my nose [one can do this with masks that leave the nose free] and blew to equalize the pressure in my ears. Carr was doing the same. Visibility was about twenty feet, with a slight current. The deeper we got, the darker it became/ At fifty feet, I could see the outline of the wreck. The boat was completely intact and lying on its right side at the edge of a precipice that dropped into nothingness. There was no indication from this vantage that there had been a fire.
I stopped and shot photos [Cussler at this point would have told you what camera and filmn she was using! So would Ian Fleming, admittedly.] Then we continued to the bottom. I checked my depth-gauge: seventy-six feet. Both Carr and I spent a second adjusting the air in our buoyancy compensator vests, just enough so that we were hovering above the bottom. Then we headed for the wreck, our lights on. As we moved in, I shot pictures from every angle, making sure to place the boat in context. Then we moved in closer. We would not touch anything on this first dive, just to get an idea of what we were up against. Carr knew that he would stay behind me and follow my lead.
Check this book out from the library, and it's worth a read. I wouldn't buy a copy though.
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