Enjoyable light read
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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.
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DEEP ...SOMETHING - FOR SURE!
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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.
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Child can do better!
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I have to agree with "C.Green"..
I am a big fan of Lincoln Child, especially of his solo-novels!
I LOVED "UTOPIA" and I liked "DEATHMATCH", so I could not wait to find out what Child would pull out of his head with his next book.
When I finally received the Hardcover (I never buy Hardcovers unless I REALLY cant wait for a paperback)I had to start reading straight away.
After opening the tasty Cover, with its very nice and promising title picture, the first few pages seemed promising.
The further I went though, the less it kept me from getting a nice cold drink from the fridge..
It does have a slight touch from "UTOPIA" and his usual style of writing, but as the last reviewer on this page said, its all been heard and said before. Very predictable (except for the idea at the end) and just not as exciting and interesting as I had hoped. What also disturbed me was all the scientific and especially MEDICAL babbling.. way to many pages wasted and made boring by all the medical words which probably only a Dr. could understand anyway.. It was like reading a report.
Well - I did not hate the book, as it did have its moments and also a satisfying good ending. I recommend it to the real fans, but warn you not to expect his ultimate work to date.
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Unoriginal & Predictable
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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.
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