Negative Positive
Title: Interesting premise, everything else is formulaic
Review: I've been a fan of the Preston/Child books ever since Relic was new, and I've enjoyed some of their solo novels as well. The central mystery here and its explanation are very interesting, but the characters are two-dimensional and so chichéd that at times I wondered if I was reading a novelization of The Abyss. Even in his own previous works, Child has long since overplayed the tired old taciturn-security-type-becomes-paranoid-and-threatening character. Here, it's like he took the security guy from Mount Dragon or the treasure hunter from Riptide or the obsessed meteorite-extraction guy from The Ice Limit and put him in uniform and stuck him underwater. The story arc was predictable, and the whole thing had a very paint-by-numbers kind of feel to it. Child could have done -- and has done -- better.
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