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Summary
Summary
Long hailed as the grand master of adventure fiction, Clive Cussler has continued to astound with the intricate plotting and astonishing set pieces of his novels. Now, with a surprising twist, he gives us his most audacious work yet. In the final pages of Valhalla Rising, Dirk Pitt discovered, to his shock, that he had two grown children he had never known-twenty-three-year-old fraternal twins born to a woman he thought had died in an underwater earthquake. Both have inherited his love of the sea: the girl, Summer, is a marine biologist; the boy, himself named Dirk, is a marine engineer. And now they are about to help their father in the adventure of a lifetime. There is a brown tide infesting the ocean off the shore of Nicaragua. The twins are working in a NUMA(r) underwater enclosure, trying to determine its origin, when two startling things happen: Summer discovers an artifact, something strange and beautiful and ancient; and the worst storm in years boils up out of the sky, heading straight not only for them but also for a luxurious floating resort hotel square in its path. The peril for everybody concerned is incalculable, and, desperately, Pitt, Al Giordino, and the rest of the NUMA(r) crew rush to the rescue, but what they find in the storm's wake makes the furies of nature pale in comparison. For there is an all-too-human evil at work in that part of the world, and the brown tide is only a by-product of its plan. Soon, its work will be complete-and the world will be a very different place. Though if Summer's discovery is to be believed, the world is already a very different place... Filled with breathtaking action and suspense, Trojan Odysseyis Cussler at the height of his storytelling powers.
Author Notes
Clive Cussler was born in Aurora, Illinois on July 15, 1931. He attended Pasadena City College for two years before enlisting in the United States Air Force during the Korean War. After his discharge from the military, he worked first as a copywriter and later as a creative director for two of the nation's most successful advertising agencies. At that time, he wrote and produced radio and television commercials that won numerous international awards, including one at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.
He began writing in 1965 and published his first novel featuring Dirk Pitt in 1973. His first non-fiction work, The Sea Hunters, was published in 1996. He has written over 50 books including the Dirk Pitt series, the NUMA Files series, Oregon Files series, Isaac Bell series, and the Fargo Adventure series.
He is the Chairman of NUMA (National Underwater and Marine Agency), a non-profit group which he founded. He and his crew of marine experts and NUMA volunteers have discovered over 60 historically significant underwater wreck sites.
Clive Cussler died on February 24, 2020 at the age of 88. (Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Adventure tales for boys (and girls) of all ages have no more vigorous champion today than Cussler, who has kept the spirit of Joe and Frank Hardy alive, albeit on a grander scale, in numerous bestsellers. This 17th Dirk Pitt extravaganza finds Cussler (literally, as he makes a cameo at book's end) and his entourage of paint-by-number characters in fine fettle, foiling a dastardly plot by outlandish villains to launch a new ice age, and at the same time demonstrating that the Achaeans were not Greeks but Celts, and that Troy was a town in what's now England. After a prelude set during the Trojan War, the novel proper starts with a roar, as a monstrous hurricane sweeps toward the Caribbean, endangering not only Pitt's twin son and daughter, engaged in undersea exploration, but also the Ocean Wanderer, a luxury floating hotel owned by a mysterious billionaire known as Specter. In a manly manner, Pitt and his longtime sidekick, Al Giordino, both of NUMA (the National Underwater and Marine Agency), save the hotel and Pitt's grown kids, but not before those kids discover a trove of underwater relics that indicate that the Celts, aka Achaeans, reached the New World millennia ago. And the Celts are still here, in the guise of a female Druidic cult linked to Specter and aiming for world domination by altering ocean currents via a vast underground mechanism in Nicaragua, which will plunge the earth into cold, then selling a new type of cheap fuel cell to supply needed heat. The action never flags, the heroics never halt and the bodies pile up as Pitt and Co. take on the villains; some big changes in Pitt's personal life close the book. Cussler's legions of fans are going to march into bookstores the day this title appears; expect whopping sales. 750,000 first printing; $750,000 ad/promo. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
The latest Dirk Pitt thriller, like its 16 predecessors, is ready made for the big screen. (Let's hope it makes a better movie than 1980's Raise the Titanic, also based on a Pitt adventure, which gives you some idea of how long the series has been around.) A hurricane threatens an undersea resort hotel; meanwhile, Dirk Pitt's twin offspring are trapped at the bottom of the ocean in Pisces, an underwater laboratory. Oh, and Dirk himself swoops in to rescue the hotel, and its guests--but what about his children? Cussler has written a lot of seabound thrillers, and he clearly knows how to put one together to get maximum excitement from minimal material. Everything is done in shorthand, from the disaster-movie-plot setup to the characters and dialogue. There's the evil-named Specter, the man behind the hotel, with a heart of cold stone. There are the twins, whose dialogue sounds like it was lifted from a Hardy Boys novel (I want to take a closer look inside the cavern where I found the urn. Can you find it in the dark? Like a fox to its lair ). In a nutshell, this novel offers precisely what readers have come to expect from a Dirk Pitt adventure: danger, heroics, villains, heroes. --David Pitt Copyright 2003 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Clive the Mighty has found a formula for his terrific escapist plots and sees no reason to alter it. Introductory historical diversions seemingly have no tie to the story--and yet a solar boat from ancient Egypt or a recovered Viking vessel may explain why a modern luxury liner that runs on seawater gets sunk by international villains, as in Valhalla Rising (2001). At the end of Valhalla, the faintly aging Dirk finds that he has two children by a long-dead lover: the 23-year-old fraternal twins Summer, now a marine biologist, and Dirk, a marine engineer, both waterfolk like himself and ready to join him in his NUMA (National Underwater Maritime Administration) adventures. Things open with a brilliantly detailed description of the fall of Troy, turning mere legend about the wooden horse into matters of engineering, and filling the reader's mind with Homeric facts to be recalled later. Cusslerian historical mystery: young Summer Pitt, spending ten days with Dirk Jr. in an underwater lab off the Navidad Bank of the Dominican Republic while investigating a horrible brown muck that's killing coral and fish, finds a sunken Bronze Age amphor determined to be from Gaul, about 3,000 years old, with encrustation proving that it landed on this very sea-bottom Way Back Then. Impossible! But then Summer and Dirk find an underwater ghost temple. Instead of an imperiled luxury liner, Cussler erects nearby the supremely luxurious Ocean Wanderer--a floating underwater resort hotel--which is hit by Hurricane Lizzie, an axe-wielding storm with 100-foot waves and winds of 250 mph. Can NUMA's Sea Sprite evacuate 1,100 souls from the hotel? And Dirk and Summer, running out of air, need rescuing as well! Plus, what's this spreading killer muck? It will take Dirk Sr. himself and sidekick Al Giordino to unmask the roly-poly villain Specter, save Summer from the Homeric Amazon priestesses who want to sacrifice her, and explain Specter's secret tunnels under Nicaragua. Hurricane Clive at his most tumultuous. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
For the past 20 years or so, Cussler has produced one old-fashioned melodrama after another featuring the heroic Dirk Pitt and his faithful sidekick, Al Giordino. These novels are comfortably familiar: they begin with a story from the past (in this case, the Trojan War), switch to a modern-day megalomaniac determined to take over the world, and then place Dirk and Al in several "how-will-they-ever-get-out-of-this" situations that stimulate listeners' imaginations. Reader Scott Brick captures perfectly the blend of suspense and humor; his ability to verbalize the banter between Dirk and Al as they find themselves in adventure after adventure adds greatly to the enjoyment of this latest classic. For all public libraries.-Joseph L. Carlson, Allan Hancock Coll., Lompoc, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.