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Review: Deception Point

Posted by Mark | Filed under Books, Reviews

Decep­tion Point
My rat­ing: 2 out of 5.

This started off as a fun book and for a long time into it I was able to sus­pend my dis­be­lief to enjoy it. It read some­thing like a weak Tom Clancy novel. At least up until a cer­tain point in dur­ing the cli­matic finale of the story. At that par­tic­u­lar point in the story, my dis­be­lief slipped into over­drive and sud­denly I felt I like was read­ing a bad movie script. *sigh* And it was so look­ing bet­ter than

To avoid spoil­ing the book for those still inter­ested, the scene in par­tic­u­lar will only be described after cut. Even there, I will try to avoid spoil­ers as much as pos­si­ble but if you wish to read the book com­pletely spoiler free; go read it before you read the rest of this arti­cle.

The heros are on a sea research ship anchored ~30 miles off the East­ern seaboard. The ship is there to gather data about some ugly sharks that have been attracted to the area some a geot­her­mal event. Magma has risen up through the Earth’s crust and got­ten close to the ocean floor; how­ever the ocean is work­ing as a mas­sive heat sink cool­ing the magma and pre­vent­ing it from erupt­ing. All but one mem­ber of the crew is on shore leave celebrating.

The main vil­lian, employ­ing a 3 man spe­cial forces team, has tracked the heros to the ship. The vil­lian & his team arrive at the ship in a black-ops heli­copter, jam­ming all radar & com­mu­ni­ca­tions. They fire a one of a half-ton of laser guided missles at a Coast Guard heli­copter sit­ting on the research ship, destroy­ing it killing the pilot instantly. The heli­copter then goes to attack the remain­ing heros and does con­sid­er­able dam­age to the ship. One of the heros makes it into a speed boat that is attached to the ship but he’s wounded and the oth­ers are cut off from him. Some of the dam­age to the research ship caused the speed boat to break free. The one hero char­ac­ter imme­di­ately starts up the boat, full throt­tle to try get­ting out of jam­ming range and to call for help. The heli­copter drops 2 of the spe­cial ops troops on the ship and goes after the speed boat.

The remain­ing heros on the ship end up tak­ing out one of the spe­cial ops troops and use him as a dis­trac­tion to take out the other one. The heli­copter fires a missle destroy­ing the speed boat and returns to see their men have been inca­pac­i­tated. They land, the main vil­lian reveals him­self¹ and dis­tracts the heros for a bit. There’s a fair amount of talk, the remain­ing spe­cial ops troop fig­ures out what the heros were doing there and that the hero’s gun is out of bul­lets. We get some fight­ing that ends up with one of the heros releas­ing and re-engaging the anchor/cable/winch. This causes peo­ple and equip­ment to go slid­ing all over the deck of the ship.

The real moment that caused me to lose my abil­ity to sus­pend dis­be­lief was when the heli­copter went over the side and Mr. Brown described it sink­ing into the depths of the ocean with all those missles. Right down through the black ocean to the magma bub­ble. He totally lost me at that point. *sigh* And up until then it was pretty good. Oh well.

¹ Don’t ask who it is; I won’t tell you. You have to read the book.

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