Saturday, April 02, 2016

The Titanic Enigma by Tom West ~ Book Review

375 miles off the coast of Newfoundland a ship comes across a strange phenomena of a massive amount of floating dead fish amongst "boiling" water and right before their eyes a dead whale surfaces. Of course, one of the sailors captures the whole thing with his phone camera and soon the whole thing is viral. With the Titanic wreck lying immediately below, Captain Jerry Durham of the U.S. Navy is put in charge of the investigation. He immediately get marine archeologists Lou Bates and Kate Wetherall on board to help the investigation as they are specialists in deep sea diving and scientific study of ship wrecks. With other countries screaming to get in on the action what they find at the bottom of the ocean puts all their lives in danger.

 I was really excited to read this book but it was just alright. It thought it would be a page turning, edge of your seat mystery involving one of my favourite topics: the Titanic. It didn't turn out to be quite what I was expecting. It goes back and forth between the present day story of the investigation and the secret that was taken aboard the Titanic so many years ago and lay hidden until now. It was not really page turning at all and really dragged in a lot of places. The trouble was I loved the Titanic part of the story a lot but majorly disliked the present day part of the story. I loved the main characters of Dr. Egbert Fortescue and Billy and really was drawn into their part of the story aboard the Titanic. I didn't like any of the characters in the present day part of the story, wasn't drawn into their lives at all. I didn't like all the long descriptions and technical jargon of U.S. army submarine stuff and descriptions of the wreck under the sea. I found it hard to translate it into an actual picture in my head, probably because I was so bored with it. I hated the f-bombs in this part of the story and most of all hated the Lord's name taken in vain a few times. I didn't like the very graphic descriptions of the murders in the present day part of the story that took place. Too descriptive for my tastes. A bit of a surprise ending wrapped up the Titanic part nicely but not enough to save the book for me to give it a higher score.

 I gave it a 5/10 because I liked 50% of it.

This review is linked up to Semicolon Saturday Review of Books



3 comments:

Faith said...

Never heard of this novel and I do like books about the Titanic as well. Don't think I'll be looking for this one!

Barbara H. said...

Hmm. Sounds like a very mixed bag.

Carrie said...

Well, I probably won't pick it up then but it did sound like it held a lot of promise! Win some, lose some!