Showing posts with label murder?. Show all posts
Showing posts with label murder?. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 25, 2024

The Chamber

The Chamber by Will Dean, 332 pages

Six divers have just entered a hyperbaric chamber that will keep them at depth pressure for the next month as they do ocean floor maintenance work in the North Sea. It's dangerous work, and there's no exiting their tiny space until the work is done and they have gone through several days of slow decompression to avoid the bends. But just a day into their mission, one of the divers doesn't wake up, and he certainly didn't die of natural causes. Even with the rest of the mission cancelled, they have four days of being locked together in a tiny chamber before they can get out.

The premise of this book has the potential to be a claustrophobic and terrifying thriller. Unfortunately, the execution doesn't live up to the potential, as the readers are told about the panic the characters were feeling rather than feeling it through the writing. It's not a horrible book, and I feel like I learned a lot about deep-sea work (which was fascinating — I once had a neighbor who was an underwater welder, and this book shed light on what his work was like). But I was disappointed that such a great premise went to waste on such meh writing.

Monday, July 5, 2021

Finlay Donovan is Killing It


 Finlay Donovan is Killing It / Elle Cosimano, read by Angela Dawe, 368 pgs.

Finlay is kind of a mess.  She is a single mom whose ex is engaged to her former real estate agent.  She is dealing with two young kids and trying to finish her next book.  When a discussion with her editor is overheard at Panera, she also gets a contract from a woman who wans Finlay to kill her husband.  Laughing off the idea of it, she decides to check the guy out.  Lots of unintended consequences later, she has a body to dispose of.  Luckily her nanny Vero is the type of person you would call in this situation and the two team up to get their lives back on track.  Highly entertaining but not all that likely.