In the Trojan Odyssey, which is the 20th in a series of Dirk Pitt novels, Clive Cussler once again grabs your attention and takes you on another thrilling adventure. This time, the whole gang is back in action.
Dirk Pitt, Al Giordino, Admiral Sandecker, Rudi Gunn and the others are all as brave and daring as ever in Trojan Odyssey.
Dirk’s 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 are 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 studies on engineering, and filling the reader’s mind with Homeric facts to be recalled later.
Meanwhile, Summer Pitt, who is spending 10 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. It's about 3,000 years old, with encrustation proving that it landed on this very sea-bottom in the ancient past.
Then Summer and Dirk find an underwater ghost temple, which piques their curiosity further. 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 villain Specter, save Summer from the Homeric Amazon priestesses who want to sacrifice her, and explain Specter’s secret tunnels under Nicaragua.
Cussler, as always, manages the difficult task of creating a bad guy who has a plan to rule or destroy the earth. He puts the world in peril, always by way of the sea, then lets Dirk Pitt save the planet from the brink of disaster.
Cussler had a unique style of starting off his novels with a long ago myth. Then he jumps to some other, seemingly unrelated scene before he drags the readers into one of his stories, takes them to a moment of climax and jumps to another story.
Then, before they know it, they’re completely hooked by the new situation. The writing style keeps the readers on the edge of the seat until all Cussler’s stories merges.
This time, Dirk Pitt only appears in Trojan Odyssey in Chapter 9. Of course, he shows up right in the nick of time to save the world.
Fans of Cussler will enjoy this Dirk Pitt adventure.