Customer Reviews

Deep Storm

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'm a great fan of the Child Preston double efforts and have only read a few of their solo novels (Tyrannosaur Canyon and The Codex) which weren't bad. I was intrigued by the premise of Deep Storm so I ordered a copy. I would describe it as a good read for the plane or beach - highly enjoyable that can be read quickly and not terribly substantial to get you bogged down. The mystery of the story - what's beneath the ocean that the undersea research station Deep Storm is trying to discover - is the main driving point of the story and it's not until the end that's it's finally revealed. It's something I didn't guess but I wasn't bowled over by the revelation either. Still, it was fun written with a racy Blockbuster type style to keep the pages turning. Some of the 'cliffhangers' at the end of several chapters basically felt like a paragraph had inadvertently been sent to the next page and so felt a bit forced.
The stories written by Child and Preston as a team are by far better.

I always considered writing a solitary endeavor so I would never thought I would say this: Child NEEDS Preston - and Preston NEEDS Child. I have read almost all their solo attempts. This one is the best and, once more, it fails. Badly.

DEEP STORM is one of those technothrillers that starts off with the best omens only to quickly get stuck in a mud-field of trivialities, cliches and predictable plot twists.
Reminding of Michael Crichton's the SPHERE, it is about a mysterious underwater artifact. An oil platform during maintenance picks up a strange signal. Is it coming from the relics of Atlantis? Is it even human? As with the SPHERE, an (overly luxurious) deep-sea research colony is built in record time (I doubt that...oil paintings and gourmet food would ever be sent to a military deep-sea environment, but maybe that's just me...). And then the strange illnesses start. Of course, a specialist doctor is summoned.

Undercover agents, security-obsessed cross-eyed villains (I found that touch of very poor taste - comparable to Dan Brown's albino villain) and danger of stellar proportions serve as the backdrop of our hero's abilities, determination and endless luck to save the day. After the first chapters it begins spinning around itself, not really going anywhere.

All in all, not a bad read - but keep your expectations down. This is neither the RELIC nor the ICE LIMIT.

When reading Deep Storm, the latest solo work from Lincoln Child, I was constantly beset by a slight feeling that I had read it before. I hadn't of course, but Deep Storm is at times so utterly derivative of both previous books such as Michael Crichton's Sphere and movies such as the Abyss that for most of its length it simply feels like a rehash of different bits of other people's work.

It is also utterly predictable. Readers might not know precisely what the 'maguffin' under the sea is until the very end, but its patently obvious from early on that its not something good. Its equally obvious from the get go that the military and the civilian characters are not going to be able to work happily together for very long (as seen in the Abyss). Even more certain is the fact that, when a story is set thousands of feet beneath the sea in a secret base, some sort of pressure related 'incident' is sure to occur at some point. All in all Deep Storm is a set of cliches strung together into a very straight forward, linear plot.

Ironically for a story set beneath the sea there's also no depth to proceedings. Characters are barely sketched. There's no emotional resonance. There are no real twists, turns or blind alleys. Questions are answered and problems are solved quickly and without any apparent effort. The more human elements of the mysteries and conspiracies on display are never dealt with in any real detail. It all allows events to zip along at a nice pace but it hardly makes for a satisfying experience.

Still, it does has zip and there is the odd set piece that gets the heart pumping and raises some sense of dramatic tension. There's also the odd original idea buried in there, such as the identity of the buried maguffin that kicks the plot off. On the whole however, this reads like a wannabe Hollywood action movie and sports the same lack of complexity as that particular movie genre. Coming from one half of the team behind classics such as Relic, Cabinet of Curiosities and the Ice Limit (the latter being another book this 'references') we should expect far better.

This book arrived promptly and in good order and my friend was very happy with his birthday present that was on his amazon wish list.

Fantastic read, couldn't wait to get back to it, we are not alone!!! I Will definitely read his other books.

Five Stars!! "Deep Storm", Lincoln Child's mystery/techno-thriller/sci-fi novel, is a page-turning, wild ride on and under the ocean. The premise has Dr Peter Crane being recruited to assist in a troublesome investigation at the "Storm King" oil platform off of Greenland, but in reality it's about much more than that: "Deep Storm". Never fully letting us in on what is happening, Child keeps the twists and turns coming as new developments become 'curve balls' that delude as much as they inform the main character, Dr Crane, and the reader.

It's a fun read. And thrilling in places, like the amazing description of the Denmark seaside incident. In the first chapter, one of my least favorite topics began as one of the premises, which was discouraging, but I kept reading and Mr Child took us way beyond that 'red-herring'. While some of the characters are almost necessarily one-dimensional, other complex characters like Dr Howard Asher and Dr Michele Bishop keep things at a tense, believable humanistic level. Avoid spoilers and jump into this novel cold, it's better that way. Highly Recommended! Five ENJOYABLE Stars!!

Deep Storm is a pretty good techno thriller. A crew must use the most advanced underwater drilling technology to reach an anomaly well below the earth's crust in water that would normally be far too deep to drill in. As in other thrillers of the sort, the main character encounters a few reasons to be suspicious, a few things go wrong, things go from bad to worse, and then it all falls apart. The premise of the story is interesting and the pacing is good, but the ending falls flat. If I had never read Child's work with Douglas Preston, I might rate it a bit higher, but I'll say it's good, not great.

I was a bit sceptical at first - thought that it was going to be one of those run of the mill 'We've found Atlantis!' stories, but I stuck at it and boy am I glad that I did.

It felt very like Doctor Who - The Tenth Planet in a sense and I would recommend it to the world and his wife!

Deep Storm is one of the best thrillers I've ever read. It has flawless pacing, an incredibly interesting story, an excellent sense of place, non-stop action, and just the right amount of character development. It has a tantalizing touch of the paranormal, a mysterious historical event that keeps surprising and unfolding, along with a great setting. The setting of an offshore oil rig and deepsea lab offers an intimacy of place, exotic to the everyday person, that envelops the reader. It should come with a warning that says "Contents Under Pressure" - you feel the deadly pressure of the ocean you are taken deep into, along with ever-mounting action and the relentless unveiling of fascinating mystery after mystery. The story stays tight to the protagonist's point of view, so you feel you are walking the halls, seeing and experiencing everything right along with him. There were many times where I felt like I was looking characters in the eye and feeling the mounting tension all around. Action and reactions were always believable. You are never separated from the central action and purpose of the story. I was riveted.

I've read a lot of thrillers and after reading Deep Storm I came to better appreciate the solid pacing that keeps the reader turning pages, balanced with just the right amount of description of environment and action so that you can picture and imagine everything, but not get bogged down in endless showy descriptions that sometimes can seem like author showmanship and slow the story down. This never happens here, though it is superbly researched. Deep Storm is just excellent storytelling, with a perfect blend of action and intrigue. The only thing I could say might have been improved upon was that I wish the explanation at the end could have been developed a little further. There's so much build up to it, it's such a cool concept, that I would have liked to stay with it just a little longer and explore it a bit more. Having said that, it is sufficient and I can understand why it was done the way it was.

I honestly could not put this book down, the story grabs you from page one and never lets go. It's a 5-star read all the way. Every day I looked so forward to diving back into the story and eagerly did so. I think this is the fastest I've read any book. Lincoln Child has the gift for penning thrillers, no doubt. Highly recommended!

~Rai Aren

This is a thriller set on an oil-drilling platform somewhere between Greenland and Iceland. I read the first pages available on the Amazon website and found the story so thrilling that just had to know what would happen next. So I bought the book.

A former US navy doctor is asked to participate in a highly unusual, highly secret project that is in progress below the aforementioned oil rig (which is no longer drilling any oil). The first anticlimax was when the protagonist was being revealed what the highly secretive project was all about. The description of protagonist's ecstatic feelings that followed was something between pathetic and ridiculous. Yeah, intellectually I realised that it was a really huge deal, but after having my expectations curbed so high by the story so far, I would have expected something imaginative. I mean, if you asked 100 people on the street to name one amazing thing the scientists might one day discover at the bottom of the ocean, I think many, if not most of them would tell you exactly the thing that is revealed to us with such incredible pomp on page 29.

I almost stopped reading. Later, though, the story got interesting again, and it was nowhere near as trivial as it had seemed. Halfway hough the book, I found myself turning pages, unable to stop. My heart was pounding and I was having difficulties falling asleep later on.

Eventually, though, the fabulous story started to seriously deteriorate. The events were getting too straightforward. After those incredibly masterful first chapters, it was amazing how the author ran so completely out of imagination by the last third of the book where he seemed to have turned to Da Vinci Code for inspiration. In the final pages, we'll get a textbook last-minute-conflict, and a timid attempt at a deep and/or romantic (I'm not sure) epilogue - maybe paving the way for a sequel, or maybe not.

Mr. Child is very good at writing about machines, constructions, plans, ingredients - to the extent that I found myself overwhelmed by all those medical terms and had to look up a number of them on Wikipedia to understand what the hell the characters were talking about. Mr. Child's math and computer science made me smile a few times but they were impressive enough for the layperson.
Mr. Child is not good at writing about personalities, feelings and motives. I'm not just talking about the protagonist being too much a saint - for an American author, it's not nearly as bad as it could be. The real problem is that the characters in general are just bland. The book contains only three characters who are anything more than pieces of cardboard with names. One of them is killed very early in the book and so doesn't really count. The second one is a complete freak, beyond credibility. The third one is the only one for whom Mr. Child would get a passing grade at a Character Creation class, should he ever take one. The rest are lifeless saints and lifeless demons, whereas the number of demons is kept to an absolute minimum necessary to have a plot. I hoped that at least one apparently so evil person would turn out to be good eventually, but no, he was consistently evil until the end. Apart from the three characters I mentioned, whoever appears even slightly negative, turns out to be 100% evil. No surprises.
I have to give the author one thing, though. Contrary to American traditions, this novel contains no slender woman overpowering several armed men. I'm really grateful for that.

To sum up: At first I was thrilled beyond words, but had I known in advance that the book had such a surpriseless ending and such a silly message, I wouldn't have bothered to read it. On first pages, a mere 5-star rating seemed almost an insult to the author. After finishing the book, I found myself hesitating between 3 and 4 stars.