Clive Cussler and Graham Brown - The Storm

After reading Runemarks anything would have been an improvement in terms of reading pleasure. I had read some Clive Cussler before but this one was written a long time after the first book I read; and with a co-author which wasn’t something I’d seen before.

The Storm follows, for the most part, the story of Kurt Austin as he investigates the mysterious death of some of his NUMA colleagues. His search eventually leads him to face off against Jinn al-Khalif, a crazy but somehow intelligent terrorist on a quest to control Asia’s water supply using tiny robots to dictate the sea temperatures and thus the direction of rain clouds. Seriously.

All in all it’s very enjoyable book if not slightly disconnected from the title. There is one storm that takes place during the prologue and the mysterious connection between the prologue and the main story is not revealed until the very of end of the 424 page book.

One thing I spend time fussing over right from the beginning was exactly how old Jinn is. In 1967 he is old or strong enough to be able to shoot a revolver at a man. Later in the book this age is revealed as 4. But what I still don’t get is the point of having these scenes happen this long ago. There is another character, Sabah, who was friends with Jinn’s father. Even assuming that Sabah is 20 in 1967, that makes him 69 in 2012. For me, this felt a little too old for the region and the type of jobs this guy was doing in order to assist Jinn in carrying out his mental plan.

I didn’t have any major issues with the story other than this. My biggest criticism of the book is the use of perspective. A lot of the time, perspectives will shift back and forth over the course of pages, and sometimes even within the same paragraph. This makes it hard to follow what’s going on in places when the story is coming at you from multiple directions.

There was one instance of using a ‘/’ in a character’s dialogue and I couldn’t get on board with this. I mean, how would you say what you were saying with a slash in the middle? If it were me, I would actually say the word ‘slash’ but I’m not particularly normal. The sentence in question would be better suited with a comma.

There’s one other small bit of story that I raised my eyebrows over. At one point, Kurt sneaks on to a plane and hides in the toilet. No one knows he’s on board but he still puts his feet up on the toilet. It doesn’t really make sense. If no one knows he is there, he has no reason to hide. It’s not like someone is going to look under the door to see if the toilet is occupied. Unless these guards check under toilets doors on a plane looking for people that they don’t know are there? But as I said, it’s minor.

I enjoyed The Storm and it will definitely encourage me to pick up a few more Cussler books in the future.

The Storm by Clive Cussler was published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 2012. RRP £7.99 (Paperback)