Description de l’éditeur
A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
'Cussler is hard to beat' Daily Mail
The thirteenth adrenaline-filled Dirk Pitt classic from multi-million-copy king of the adventure novel, Clive Cussler.
A hundred and forty years after a British ship wrecks on the way to an Australian penal colony and the survivors discover diamonds on the tropical island where they wash up, Maeve Fletcher, one of their descendants, is stranded on an island in Antarctica with a party of passengers after their cruise ship seemingly abandons them.
Dirk Pitt, on an expedition to find the source of a deadly plague that is killing dolphins and seals in the Weddell Sea, finds Maeve and the passengers and rescues them from death. When Pitt later uncovers the cause of the plague, he discovers that Maeve's father, Arthur Dorsett, and her two sisters are responsible because of their diamond-mining technology. A deadly race develops to stop Dorsett from continuing his murderous mining operations and to head off a disaster that will kill millions. Pitt's struggle to foil Dorsett's ruthless plan to destroy the market for diamonds and thus gain a monopoly of his own takes him from harrowing adventures off the west coast of Canada to being cast adrift in the Tasman Sea.
'Clive Cussler is the guy I read' Tom Clancy
'The Adventure King' Daily Express
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dirk Pitt (Inca Gold), eco-warrior of the National Underwater & Marine Agency (NUMA), returns for another boys' adventure tale, this one set in the year 2000. Along for the sail are Pitt's roly-poly sidekick, Al Giordino, and father-figure Admiral Sandecker, head of NUMA. As with all of Cussler's novels since he raised the Titanic 20 years ago, the plot is a pip. People and animals are dying mysteriously and in droves on various ocean shores, a catastrophe caused by high-frequency sound waves generated by the ruthless diamond-mining techniques of Australian tycoon Arthur Dorsett, whose fiendish plan is to ruin the diamond cartel and corner the colored gem market. Sometime after Pitt gets on the case, he winds up being cast adrift by Dorsett in a small, leaky boat in the Pacific; also on board are steadfast Al and Dorsett's rebel daughter, Maeve, who provides the novel's love interest. The three are shipwrecked but survive to build a small craft that will take them to Dorsett's island fortress, where they hope to rescue Maeve's twin sons, hostages of the unlikely villain (Dorsett suffocates one enemy by stuffing his mouth with diamonds). Meanwhile, Admiral Sandecker realizes that the deadly sound from Dorsett's four Pacific mines will soon converge in Honolulu, killing everyone there. That Cussler's American characters measure and weigh things in metric terms isn't nearly as aggravating as the author's prose, which is not just wooden but petrified. Still, John Gardner notwithstanding, in spirit if not style the Pitt series is the closest thing going to that highwater mark of cartoonish derring-do, Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, and the rollicking rough-and-tumble here should satisfy most action fans just fine. 750,000 first printing; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club main selection.
