Odessa Sea

October 3, 2016
On the Black Sea, the setting for bestseller Cussler’s intricately plotted 24th Dirk Pitt adventure, the seventh coauthored with son Dirk (after 2014’s Havana Storm), a Russian freighter has encountered a deadly mystery that has killed almost everyone aboard. Fortunately, Dirk and his crew aboard the Macedonia, an oceanographic research ship, are nearby, allowing Dirk and pal Al Giordino to investigate. After Dirk and Al rescue a lone crew member, a small explosion on the stern sends the freighter to the bottom of the sea. Ana Belova, a special investigator with Europol, and her partner, Lt. Petar Ralin, from the Bulgarian Organized Crime Directorate, assist Dirk and company in the hunt for Martin Hendriks, a Dutch businessman who’s working a complicated deal with the Russians to acquire a nuclear weapon. The pages whip by as the characters, at least the good guys, survive one deadly encounter after another, and the bad guys get their comeuppances. Readers will anxiously await Dirk’s next adventure. Agent: Peter Lampack, Peter Lampack Agency.

November 1, 2016
Cussler's conglomerate (Built to Thrill, 2016, etc.) gives fans their money's worth with 500 pages chronicling Dirk Pitt's Black Sea adventures while hopscotching back to the Russian Revolution, then up to today's Iranian quest for nuclear weapons, and throwing in a rogue terror attack on the United States for good measure.Dirk and his longtime lieutenant, the rugged Al Giordino, are sailing the Black Sea because his National Underwater and Marine Agency has been contracted by Bulgaria to seek an Ottoman-era shipwreck. They answer a distress call from a ship they find full of dead bodies and highly enriched uranium, which turns out to have been purloined from unstable Ukraine by cohorts of Valentin Mankedo, a Bulgarian black-market smuggler, and destined for Iran. Meanwhile, Dirk junior and twin sister Summer work the Baltic Sea, where they stumble on shadowy hints of a trove of 1917 Romanov gold bullion. The second nefarious Mankedo enterprise troubling Pitt's crew is the salvage of an atomic weapon from a Soviet 1955 bomber crash. Mankedo's been financed by Martin Hendriks, tech billionaire and cutting-edge Peregrine drone manufacturer, whose devious plans include an elaborate false-flag operation. The A-bomb is usable because it's been submerged in "anoxic waters...loaded with hydrogen sulfide," so oxygen-deprived that it prevents corrosion. There are the usual esoteric Cussler-style science and historical factoids to spice up the story, but to spark the hunt for the czar's gold, he imagines a Proposed Treaty of Petrograd which send the younger Pitts seeking the bullion in secret tunnels burrowing through the Rock of Gibraltar. In one storyline or the other, there are cinematic boat chases, nighttime commando raids, dueling research submersibles, a secret trip to Bermuda, and a Chesapeake Bay battle involving the Civil War sloop USS Constellation. Sketch out some exotic, ephemeral settings, make every villain as nasty as possible, and it's another of Cussler's cinematic-style entertainments spinning out at hold-on-to-your-hat speed.

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June 15, 2016

This new NUMA tale links early 1900s efforts to save the Romanov dynasty, a Cold War bomber lost with its dangerous cargo, and the modern-day smuggling of nuclear materials in the Mediterranean region, with all of those elements converging toward global catastrophe. Cussler's first series, which continues to sell the best.

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