Deep Fathom

by James Rollins
454 pgs

I've been a pretty big fan of James Rollins' Sigma Force series for many years. Each book in the series (which come out every year like clockwork) is a fun, fast-paced, check-your-sense-of-realism-at-page-one thriller that offers hours of entertainment. But before he launched the series, he wrote a handful of stand-alone books--Deep Fathom is one of those.

The book begins on the day of the first solar eclipse of the new millennium. Ex-Navy SEAL, Jack Kirkland and his salvage ship "Deep Fathom" are somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, searching for an old sunken Japanese ship, which was purported to have been carrying millions of dollars' worth of gold bricks when it sank. Jack and his team are  hoping to find the ship and claim the salvage. He's able to locate the ship with the use of a small submersible, but just when he reaches the gold, an underwater earthquake triggers a large volcanic eruption and Jack has to flee to the surface before his sub can be destroyed.

The earthquake, which turns out to be only one of many deadly disasters which occurred at the same time around the Pacific, occurred right at the time of the solar eclipse, and the Deep Fathom is soon sent to search the site of an airplane crash nearby, another casualty during the eclipse. When Jack gets his ship to the site, he learns that the plane that went down was Air Force One, which crashed with the President on board.

Deep Fathom is a decent book. Rollins keeps things moving along at a pretty quick pace, and he keeps it pretty interesting throughout. But having read the many books he's written since, it's clear he was still honing his writing skills. The characters are pretty one-dimensional and the dialogue (which I think to this day he needs some more practice on) leaves a lot to be desired. Fortunately, I started reading his books with the later ones. I think if this was the first of his books I read, I might not have been interested enough to continue reading his others.

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆