Clive Cussler
I know, I know......not a classic in literature, but......I mean, sometimes you have to read just to kill time, or relaxing on the beach, without too much thinking, right? Well, his books are just that, well written, amusing, relaxing and enjoyable time-killers......I guess I've read almost all of them (I've spent so many time in doctors/dentists/physicians waiting-rooms!!!!).
About him: Clive Cussler grew up in Alhambra, California, and attended Pasadena City College before joining the Air Force. He went on to a successful advertising career, winning many national honours for his copywriting. Now a full-time bestselling author, he has also explored the deserts of the American Southwest in search of lost gold mines, dived in isolated lakes in the Rocky Mountains looking for lost aircraft and hunted under the sea for shipwrecks of historic significance, discovering and identifying more than sixty. Like his hero, Dirk Pitt, he is also an avid enthusiast of classic cars. He is married with three children, and divides his time between Colorado and Arizona.
Flood Tide (1997): Once again, the indestructible Dirk Pitt saves the country from possible economic collapse, while at the same time destroying an evil villain, finding a lost treasure, and saving a woman's life. The vividly described action takes readers from the ports of Hong Kong to picturesque Washington State and to the final showdown on the Mississippi River in Louisiana. As each problem seems to be solved, larger and more dangerous events occur, such as the seemingly unexplainable smuggling of thousands of illegal Chinese immigrants. Our hero finds himself trapped with these poor, abused refugees who are about to be murdered. Each turn and twist continues to build anxiety and heighten suspense.
Cyclops (1986):Written in the bestselling style of Pacific Vortex! and Deep Six, and with the indestructible Dirk Pitt as its hero, this latest Cussler suspense caper features, and ingeniously connects, a maverick American colony on the Moon, a fabulous sunken treasure sought by an unscrupulous, blimp-owning financier, and two cunningly devised Soviet schemes, one to steal U.S. space secrets, the other to replace Fidel Castro with a Kremlin puppet, no matter what the cost in human lives. The nonstop action involves murder and torture as well as superpower politicking, and Pitt extricates himself from one desperate situation after another, even finding time for a little romance.
Deep Six (1984): Somewhere off the coast of Alaska, a sunken cargo poses a threat of unthinkable proportions. Potentially, the lost shipment of chemicals could destroy all life in the ocean -- and perhaps the world -- unless Dirk Pitt can find it first. But time is running out for the NUMA agent and his team. Pitt's main target is just one deadly component of a vast international conspiracy fueled by hijacking, bribery, and murder. And at the center of it all is a powerful Korean shipping empire with a chilling political agenda -- to kidnap the President of the United States...
Dragon (1990): Japanese businessmen have created a diabolical plot to control world economy, and all is going well until a radiation leak occurs on board the auto carrier Divine Star . Dirk Pitt is almost killed in the tremors from the explosion aboard the carrier, and the plot weaves suspensefully as he begins to solve the puzzles around him. Nuclear holocaust, secret underwater stations, Japanese art discovered in an old Nazi underground vault, and the kidnapping of two U. S. Congressmen carry readers through an exciting story of power and insatiable greed. Humor pervades the story; Cussler places himself in one scene, suggests in another that the yen become the currency of the United States, and dresses Pitt's Uncle Percy in a lavender sport coat and lizard-skin boots.
Iceberg (1975): Just seventy-two hours ago, Dirk Pitt was lying in the hot California sun with a beautiful woman, a Scotch-rocks in one hand, but an urgent call from Admiral James Sandecker, his commander at the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), brings Pitt out of the warm Pacific breezes and straight into a North Atlantic deep freeze. The reason: the dis- covery of a long-missing luxury yacht, en route to a secret White House rendezvous, frozen solid in a mil- lion-ton tombstone of ice. Tunneling his way into the core of the berg, Pitt comes upon a gruesome scene -- a crew of corpses, horribly incinerated at their posts -- but the vessel's priceless cargo, which could alter the balance of world power and put the threat of annihilation at America's doorstep, has vanished. This discovery is the springboard from which Clive Cussler -- The Grand Master of Adventure -- launches a compelling and powerful story that takes Dirk Pitt from the remote, uninhabited tundra of Iceland to the frigid abyss of the North Atlantic, determined to force his deadly, unseen opponent -- a multibillionaire in the business of playing God -- to make his next move. But first Pitt will have to penetrate the shroud of mystery concealing a titanic network of international financial intrigue -- and mass murder. Lives, nations, continents are at stake. And although his enemies may have the firepower as always, Dirk Pitt has the skill and the daring, the ruthlessness and resourcefulness to meet it. He also has Kirsti Fyrie, an Icelandic beauty whose twin brother died on the ice-encased yacht and who carries in her heart the secret that Pitt needs to destroy his opponents in this deadly game.
Inca Gold (1991): A chance rescue of two divers trapped in a Peruvian sinkhole leads series hero Dirk Pitt into a search for lost treasure that involves grave robbers, art thieves and ancient curses. Cussler's adventure novel features terrorists who aren ' t really terrorists and a respected archeologist who is not what he seems; it all boils down to a race between Pitt and some unscrupulous crooks for a cache of Inca gold hidden away from the Spanish and lost since the 16th century. The villains, a society of art and antiquity smugglers called the Solpemachaco , want to get their hands on the Golden Body Suit of Tiapollo, which contains in its hieroglyphics a description of the Inca treasure's hidden burial place. Pitt ends up searching for a jade box containing a quipu , an Inca silver-and-gold metalwork map to the treasure. The box was stolen from the Indians by the Spanish, stolen from the Spanish by Francis Drake and then lost in the South American jungle, but readers who know Pitt know that that a 400-year-old missing clue is only a minor obstacle.
Shock Wave (1995): Dirk Pitt, eco-warrior of the National Underwater & Marine Agency (NUMA), returns for another boys' adventure tale, this one set in the year 2000. Along for the sail are Pitt's roly-poly sidekick, Al Giordino, and father-figure Admiral Sandecker, head of NUMA. People and animals are dying mysteriously and in droves on various ocean shores, a catastrophe caused by high-frequency sound waves generated by the ruthless diamond-mining techniques of Australian tycoon Arthur Dorsett, whose fiendish plan is to ruin the diamond cartel and corner the colored gem market. Sometime after Pitt gets on the case, he winds up being cast adrift by Dorsett in a small, leaky boat in the Pacific; also on board are steadfast Al and Dorsett's rebel daughter, Maeve, who provides the novel's love interest. The three are shipwrecked but survive to build a small craft that will take them to Dorsett's island fortress, where they hope to rescue Maeve's twin sons, hostages of the unlikely villain (Dorsett suffocates one enemy by stuffing his mouth with diamonds). Meanwhile, Admiral Sandecker realizes that the deadly sound from Dorsett's four Pacific mines will soon converge in Honolulu, killing everyone there.
Sahara (1992): 1996, Egypt. Searching for a treasure on the Nile, Dirk Pitt thwarts the attempted assassination of a beautiful U.N. scientist investigating a disease that is driving thousands of North Africans into madness, cannibalism, and death. The suspected cause of the raging epidemic is vast, unprecedented pollution that threatens to extinguish all life in the world's seas. Racing to save the world from environmental catastrophe, Pitt and his team, equipped with an extraordinary, state-of-the-art yacht, run a gauntlet between a billionaire industrialist and a bloodthirsty West African tyrant. In the scorching desert, Pitt finds a gold mine manned by slaves and uncovers the truth behind two enduring mysteries -- the fate of a Civil War ironclad and its secret connection with Lincoln's assassination, and the last flight of a long-lost female pilot....Now, amidst the blazing, shifting sands of the Sahara, Dirk Pitt will make a desperate stand -- in a battle the world cannot afford to lose!
Night Probe (1981): 1914: United States undersecretary of state, Richard Essex, is traveling on the Manhattan Limited Train. With him is one of three copies of the North American Treaty. A document few government officials know about which will have an insurmountable effect on the future of the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Meanwhile, on the very same evening and halfway across the world, Harvey Shields, deputy secretary of the British Foreign Office, carries a copy of the treaty with him while sailing on a ship called the Empress of Ireland. Coincidentally, the train carrying Richard Essex plunges through a gap in a bridge and sinks in the Hudson River, and the ship with Harvey Shields aboard collides with a coal collier and sinks in the St. Lawrence River. Neither man's corpse is recovered and the two copies of the treaty are gone with them. Canada's prime minister has the third copy, but since the treaty is not favorable to the Canadian's he destroys it. The matter is laid to rest. The North American Treaty is never to be. Those few officials who know of the pact keep their silence and the world never knows how close we came to rewriting history. 1989: U.S. naval commander, Heidi Milligan, is writing a thesis when she comes across a letter written by Woodrow Wilson referring to the North American Treaty. Curious, she probes into the matter and discovers that even the most expert historians have no knowledge of any North American Treaty. When the word leaks out about Heidi's investigation, the U.S. and Great Britain do some detective work of their own and are stunned to learn that the treaty was indeed real. If a copy could be found, it would be valid even after seventy-five years. The United States would profit greatly from it but Great Britain would lose. Could an intact copy of the treaty be found underwater after all these years? Call in Dirk Pitt, director of special projects for the National Underwater Marine Agency. Dirk and his men take on the task of attempting to recover the treaty for the U.S. despite the remote probability of finding it. Great Britain, on the other hand, wants to find it first so they can destroy it, rendering it useless to the U.S. Brian Shaw, a retired top-notch spy is hired to lead the British crew on their search. The race begins!
Treasure (1988): When the great Library of Alexandria was ordered sacked in A.D. 391, could some of its fabulous art treasures and volumes from its magnificent library have escaped the flames and been ferried across the Atlantic? It's an improbable if intriguing notion, but probability is not the strong suit of this wild charade of a novel that features the greatest treasure hunt of all timesome 1600 years after the fabulous riches disappeared. The narrative also encompasses the bloody attempts of two supposedly religious fanatics (who turn out to be brothers in a "criminal dynasty") to seize power in Egypt and Mexico, respectively; the kidnapping of the legitimate presidents of those two countries aboard a cruise ship; and the dazzling exploits of the green-eyed Dirk Pitt, a super-James Bond type whom "no woman could completely possess." These exploits include tracking the cruise ship to Tierra del Fuego, defeating, with the aid of some Special Forces agents, hordes of Arab and Mexican terrorists in several brutal encounters, and locating and saving the treasure.
Raise the Titanic (1976): In it, the U.S. government becomes interested in the wreck when it's determined that the world's only stockpile of a rare radioactive element - one suddenly critical to an proposed missile defense program - may have gone down with it. The plot takes us back nearly a century in time to a mysterious Colorado mining disaster, to the snowy wastes of Arctic Russia, to a harrowing chase across England and to the night in 1912, etched into popular legend, that the grand ship sunk on its maiden voyage. Pitt plays less of a role in this one than in most of his books, but emerges in the second half of the book to not only raise the wreck but to save it, with his usual ingenuity, from a hurricane and a dastardly Soviet plot.
Vixen 03 (1976): 1954. Vixen 03 is down. The plane, bound for the Pacific carrying thirty-six Doomsday bombs—canisters armed with quick-death germs of unbelievable potency—vanishes. Vixen has in fact crashed into an ice-covered lake in Colorado. 1988. Dirk Pitt, who heroically raised the Titanic, discovers the wreckage of Vixen 03. But two deadly canisters are missing. They're in the hands of a terrorist group. Their lethal mission: to sail a battleship seventy-five miles up the Potomac and blast Washington, D.C., to kingdom come. Only Dirk can stop them.
Pacific Vortex (1981): Dirk Pitt's first, most terrific adventure! Dirk Pitt, death-defying adventurer and deep-sea expert, is out to the ultimate test as he plunges into the perilous waters of the Pacific Vortex -- a fog-shrouded sea zone where dozens of ships have vanished without a trace. The latest victim is the awesome superb Starbuck, America's deep-diving nuclear arsenal. Its loss poses an unthinkable threat to national defense. Pitt's job is to find it, salvage it, before the sea explodes. In a furious race against time, Pitt's mission swirls him into a battle with underwater assassins-and traps him in the arms of Summer Moran, the most stunningly exotic and dangerous toward disaster, Clive Cussler plummets his hero onto an ancient sunken island-the astonishing setting for the explosive climax of Pacific Vortex!
