Terrorists

Pitt does it again!
Great story.
Interesting history involving the Romanovs that got me reading "George, Nicholas And Wilhelm" by Miranda Carter.
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A fun explosion filled thrill ride. ( )

Probably not the best in the series--it certainly did not grab me! #24 seems to follow the old formula --- is predictable, too long and boring. This one is even worse than the last two in the series--pitch trim is set for a descent and we're about to crash. To expect the Director of a Cabinet level US agency to be out diving in the Black Sea is complete lunacy: 1) security trolls wouldn't have it, 2) some other agency would eat NUMA up and gobble it's budget. The author doesn't really know what happens in DC. Positive reviews must have been written by a Russian troll-bot to improve ratings in the current Ukraine war. This is terminal writing and I won't bother with another Dirk Pitt novel. DNF -- the ultimate downer. ( )

Three eras of Russian history in the last century converge in a dangerous combination of treasure, war, personal greed, and personal vengeance that affect four nations in various ways. Odessa Sea is the twenty-fourth book in Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt series and the seventh cowritten with his son Dirk.

After three consecutive books that had fun narratives but were weighed down by tired tropes compared, the Cusslers wrote a book on par with their first three collaborative efforts. The backdrop of the still ongoing, even in 2021, Russo-Ukrainian war and an apparently duplicitous industrialist that appears to be selling weapons to both sides but with an agenda quite different was a great twist at the end of the book. The black-market smugglers-salvagers that the elder Pitt deals with throughout the book’s main subplot were competent villains, one half of which were stopped by Pitt and Giordino doing their thing while the other half were taken out by the antagonist of the second subplot. Dirk and Summer’s battle with a Russian spy to find missing Romanov gold was a fun mystery—that once again took them to London which is becoming a trope now—which featured the antagonist-antagonist battle and Summer for once not being a damsel-in-distress but showing she had the Pitt genes to take care of herself.

Odessa Sea is the penultimate collaboration between Clive and Dirk Cussler, but of the seven it probably is the best overall book featuring two intriguing subplots that interact in interesting ways without being weighed down by the tired tropes that hampered their previous three efforts. ( )