Atlantis

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 14/08/2006

Marine archeologist Jack Howard may have found the key to uncovering Atlantis, the legendary sunken city purportedly built by a flourishing culture. A scrap of papyrus discovered in an Egyptian desert, which may contain a secondhand account of the lost city, sends Jack scrambling to assemble a team, including Costas, an MIT- and Stanford-trained expert in "submersible technology" and Katya, a beautiful Russian Atlantis specialist. Once prepped and in position in the Aegean Sea, Jack and company find themselves caught up with Kazakhstan terrorists and a multicountry fight over a missing Soviet nuclear submarine and that's before they've uncovered the ancient secrets of the lost city. It's thrilling stuff for sure, but the story limps along on complicated, exposition-heavy science that's doled out much too slowly (characters walk each other often and at length through their particular areas of expertise as the plot requires). Gibbons, an underwater archeologist and Cambridge University Ph.D., knows his science; still, things don't pick up until the second half of the story, when the dive gives way to a more straightforward kidnapping plot. The historical conspiracy angle gives the book Da Vinci-esque appeal, and the intense visual details of the team's marine discoveries make it naturally cinematic, but if history and science lectures aren't your cup of Dramamine, you might want to give this one a pass.