Divided, Sunken

Joe DeMarco does, shall we say, "odd jobs" for the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Mike Lawson has been writing about them since 2005, when the Speaker had Joe probe the Secret Service for evidence a presidential assassination attempt had inside help.

Some of Joe's work has been less than savory, as the Speaker is a man who takes his marital vows about as lightly as he takes his obligation to be a public servant above reproach. That facet of Joe's life is one of the problems for the 2011 DeMarco novel, House Divided. He's kind of a slimy protagonist and none of the rest of the major cast is anyone to root for either.

A murder has taken place in Washington. The National Security Agency intercepted radio transmissions that could help investigators, but because they were spying on communications that they weren't supposed to be spying on, they can't do much about it. The secretive group that engineered the murder is worried information about their activities didn't die with the murdered man, and they start to look into things as well.

The problem for Joe is that the murdered man was a relative and he's the only family in Washington who can handle the arrangements. His attempts to do so interest both the NSA and the other group, and Joe finds himself in the middle of their competition, being used as a pawn. It's a role that suits him not at all, so he takes matters into his own hands.

As mentioned above, none of the people given a lot of "screen time" in the novel make for people on whose side you'd care to be. NSA folks want to protect the country, but the two main players in this scheme seem to forget that protecting the country doesn't matter much if you run roughshod over the country's people. The leader of the other group is a cardboard cutout of a square-jawed, no-nonsense fellow who's the Only One Willing To Do What Needs To Be Done. Lawson draws his cabal of operatives from the Old Guard, the selective volunteer group who guard the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington Cemetery. Anyone, even these brave soldiers, can take a wrong turn, but Lawson's linkage of their devotion to their duty and the idea of honor that fuels it to their participation in the covert group is also kind of slimy.

Add to that goofy plot holes like DeMarco being pretty uninformed about folks in Washington for a guy who's supposed to be a fixer for the Speaker of the House, and House Divided makes some tiresome reading.

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David Gibbins has a problem. His prologue to his latest novel of marine archaeologist-adventurer Jack Howard is a taut short story of survival on the open seas. His opening act of the main novel, in which Howard and his partner Costas dive near a sunken volcano while using special protective suits, is a rip-roarer as good as anything Clive Cussler's put to paper. His flashback to the dilemma faced by German Luftwaffe officer Ernst Hoffman in the last days of World War II, which will set up the second half of the main novel, creates a full-bodied, rich character who interests the reader.

The rest of his book, though, is crap. The main sequence, in which Jack and some of his fellow scientists have to work to stop a European crime lord from gaining access to a terrible Nazi superweapon, is endlessly padded with reminiscing detours by Jack and others, and moves its events forward at a pace that would make glaciers say, "You're holding me up here." The clues to the resting places of the different weapon components are tied in with Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler's fascination with ancient mystical artifacts and lost civilizations, including lost Atlantis -- conveniently found by Jack in the previous novel. So the mysteries of Atlantis and its connection with the legend of Gilgamesh and the story of Noah must be puzzled out.

It's in those places that Atlantis drags the slowest. Gibbins is himself a marine archaeologist and the conversational expositorrhea he puts in his scientists' mouths reads like Victor Appleton reconstructed a lecture on the subject from notes he took while on Benadryl. That may seem like a harsh thing to say, but the good passages of this book prove Gibbins knows how to tell a story and it's not improper to hold him to that standard in the rest of the book as well. Especially when "the rest of the book" equals "the main story we bought the thing for."