It’s irritating when you read a novel that has specialist information to which you might be privy, only to find that it’s full of inaccuracies.
I remember reading a Robert Ludlum book in which some people were eaten by schooling hammerheads while diving in the Mediterranean, and we’ve all read about scuba divers with oxygen tanks in the popular press.
Steve Turley obviously knows his subject, however, so when he came to write his second diving-based novel, which is set mainly in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and involves a certain amount of cave-diving, he was able to avoid such pitfalls.
A deadly disease is sweeping through Europe. When the mutilated body of a diver is found inland, far from the coast, the narrator’s friend, cave-diver Mike Summers, investigates and plunges into a world of intrigue and terror.
It’s all tied up with Mexico’s Mayan civilisation and the Yucatan’s subterranean cave-systems. It’s an adventure story of the Ludlum and Brown school with a touch of the H Rider Haggards and Ian Flemings thrown in.
I read the 290 pages of non-stop action from cover to cover during one aeroplane journey, without ever being tempted to resort to the in-flight entertainment system instead.
John Bantin
Checkpoint Press
ISBN: 9781906628406
Softback, 292pp, £11.99
