The Atlantis Revelation: A Thriller [Mass Market Paperback]

I've always been interested in anything to do with Atlantis and this was the third book of a set so I figured it should be a good read. It opens with an action scene in the Mediterranean ocean. A guy dives on a sunken German WWII sub that's 300 feet down. He's on a tether with a air hose diving to 300 feet. He finds the skeleton of the captain, intact, gets attacked by 3 other divers and one of them cuts his air hose. Then he blacks out for awhile, with no air. Wakes up, gets grabbed by the skeleton, grabs the skull like a bowling ball and "breaks it off the skeleton" and uses it to smash the bony hand holding his leg. He sees a brick of C-4 with a timer counting down from 2:45, 2:44, 2:43,,, The sub starts to slide off a ledge into the 3 mile deep abyss as he stays at the same depth the sub drops down from around him. He swims off to the side as the sub explodes and then he rides the blast to the serface, from 300 feet deep and no air for at least 3 minutes, (more like ten or fifteen minutes from the time his air hose was cut and the sub blows up) When he gets to the serface his boat is gone and several dead Bottle Nose Dolphins that were cooked in the explosion are floating around him but he's fine.
Now of course its filled out a bit in the book but do you see how many things are wrong with it? Free dives to 300 feet are very dangerous. You need air/gas mixture and decompress on the way back up. It cant be done on a tether and air hose. There wouldn't be any skeletons or bones left on the sub after over 60 years, intact or other wise. A couple dozen Dolphins get cooked in the same blast that takes the guy back to the serface, from 300 feet deep, with no air. He also was shot through the leg with a spear gun and reached down with one hand and broke the barbed end off that was sticking out of his leg then stabbed the guy that shot him in the stomach with it. All after his air hose was cut. This is all in the first chapter. I hate it when a author thinks that I'm stupid.
Its obvious that the author doesn't know anything about diving. He wrote an extensive opening scene and didn't even research something as simple as diving information to get it right. From there it goes to the bottom of the ocean under the North Pole. I'm not sure but I don't think that I can finish this book. The author needed to research better the things that he writes about. If the rest of it is as wildly inaccurate as the opening chapters I'm not going to be able to stand it. It reminds me of the movie Armageddon. It was a big hit because of all the computer animation and explosions and people ignored that 99% of what they did was flat out impossible.

I only made it through the first two chapters of this so-called "Thriller". It's a unsatisfying version of the now standard "Saving the World from the Bad Guys" genre adventure with semi-religious and/or supernatural overtones. The plot line is unbelieveable, the dialog is sophomoric and the characters are cardboard-like. What I find truly amazing is how the publisher convinced other well known real thriller authors to agree to quotes of praise that appear on the rear flap and back cover. The only good news here is that I didn't also waste my money on the earlier two books in this series.

How is the narration related to the topic of Atlantis? The linkage is rather thin but the book is marginally readable and it does seem to meet the requirements for a 'Conrad saves the world and gets the girl' type action thriller. Significant chunks of the plot could be traced back to sources such as the Indiana Jones series, The DaVinci Code, National Treasure, the current celeb, conspiracy and political Internet chatter and maybe the Wikipedia and a few Google tools.

Briefly discussing the plot - because we don't want to spoil the fun - distinguished scholar, incredibly sexy, near-indestructible, hyperactive man of the world and man of action Conrad Yeats mingles with today's 'masters of the Universe', shoots a few of them dead, gets himself beat, shot, electrocuted, drowned and... bedded, stops, humiliates, hurts or delays the bad guys every time he's offered the opportunity and it's all in good fun and for the good of the unsuspecting and generally indifferent world. The reason for Atlantis in the title seems to be this installment being part of a series of Atlantis-related thrillers and the aptly-named 'Flammenschwert' being allegedly related to some ancient technology that could be traced back to the old Atlantis civilization. That's just about all I will say because the near-300 pages could be gobbled up in one or 2 reading sessions so, those who can't wait to find out what the book was about can reach the end quickly and for the most parts painlessly.

Concerning the style... it's an action thing. No one should expect any deep introspective discussions or the characters ever slowing down or stopping to think much about what they are doing before jumping in or out of cars, boats or planes, shooting or blowing up each other or jumping in and out of bed with each other. It's all fast action and, it seems, the author found an interesting way of doing away with long and artsy descriptions of people, circumstances or locales. And why bother in our rapidly globalized and standardized world with long-winded paragraphs when all required is a few well-known international brand names and logos thrown into the narration and we can all picture it for ourselves. Why bother with complex narrations when simply stating that X was waiting for Y 'by a silver Mercedes-Benz G55 AMG sport-utility vehicle" would do as well - we can easily picture it in our mind or, if we are not familiar with the brand or model, we can Google it and get all the specs in a second. And stating that 'the plane was a propeller-driven DHC-3, powered by a single six hundred-horsepower Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial and fitted with floats' should be enough when telling the reader that the young, sexy and pilot-experienced nun was about to board a sea plane. The characters who don't bother with BlackBerries are stuck with $100,000 Vertu phones except for a couple of minor characters relegated to Nokias. The tycoons and potentates tend to have real names: Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, Bill Gates, Madonna and we all know who they are and what they are about. The sites tend to be well known or at least easily Googleable: Gstaadt, Corfu, the Vatican, the Temple Mound and except for one or two brief incidents there is no mud or sweating and no one ever tires or slows down. Many of the events have recently occurred in 'real life' and simply making reference to them removes the need to burden the reader with any elaborate explanation of what exactly is going on - to the extent that the reader watches the cable 'news' channels and is familiar with some of the conspiracy theories that are well and abundantly documented on the Net.

The narration is so simplified and reduced to global standards, all that's left is a lot of room for the action characters to constantly and frantically chase each other, bump into each other and shoot at each other and fast-travel on, over or around an area comprising mostly the Southern Europe plus Switzerland and Jerusalem. This, usually, unwinding with dozen of world 'dignitaries' and various well-known castles, palaces or well-known tourist attractions as the backdrops.

I do not want to leave the wrong impression. As far as brand names, locations and today's news and events, the book is very well researched. The author correctly states that a Tweet can only be 140 characters long and 'Glacier 3000' is correctly placed in Gstaadt. Sarkozy is indeed married to Clara Bruni, the foreign minister of Israel is or was recently named 'Tzipi' and Bill Gates is known to be attending the Bilderberg conferences. The book abounds in street names, restaurants, boutiques, hotels, palaces and castles that can be looked up and found to actually exist and, should The Atlantis Revelation turn into the kind of blockbuster the DaVinci Code became, it would be possible to organize book-inspired tours covering most of the sites mentioned where the participants could actually wear, drive, fly, drink, eat and, under controlled circumstances, maybe even shoot the brands mentioned in the story but that's not likely to happen. The over-abundance of brand names is annoying, the actual celebrities 'speaking' in the book can seem spooky and clichéd and the motives behind all that plotting and killing are not convincing. Unlike the DaVinci Code where the action and the interactions support, explain and attempt to validate some lofty idea, in The Atlantis Revelation the 'ideas' - the mysteries and the conspiracies - seem to be there as a pretext for more bloody clashes and more spectacular explosions.

I commend the author for the thorough research but there should be more to good literature than well-researched facts, even in a self-described thriller. The book gets 3 stars (mildly positive) mainly for the effort. A little more work on character and plot development could make the next installment a genuine first-class thriller.

I titled my review 'Flammenschwert' because 'Flammenschwert' is probably the most frequently used proper noun in this narration and there's a lot of them. Probably closely followed by 'BlackBerry'.