Deep Storm

Peter Crane, a naval physician, flies out to an oil rig to investigate what appears to be the first appearance of an incredibly virulent disease. But when he gets there, he discovers that the problem is even worse than he was led to believe. The disease is attacking the residents of a deep-water research facility, not the oil workers, and it could be linked to the facility's excavations of an ancient site that might hold the key to the fate of the lost city of Atlantis. Child, whose stand-alone novels generally are not quite as good as the series novels he cowrites with Douglas Preston, turns the tables here, setting his hook in the first couple of pages and slowly reeling the reader in. The prose may be a tad rough, but the story is imaginative and filled with wonder. Lovers of deep-sea adventure (and in particular fans of the James Cameron movie The Abyss or Michael Crichton's novel Sphere, 1987) will want to plunge into this one.