A team of saturation divers enters their hyperbaric chamber for a routine 28-day stay, but not everyone will make it out alive in Will Dean's breathless thriller, The Chamber. From the coast of Scotland, the diving support vessel Deep Topaz sets off for the underwater oil-industry infrastructure of the North Sea, its crew of six divers ready for a lucrative but grueling month of work on the sea floor. Ellen Brooke, the sole female diver in the group, begins documenting life as a "sat rat" in the chamber with her camcorder, hoping to attract more women to enter the field. The chamber, which is the "size of a family bathroom," consists of three sets of bunk beds, a small table for meals, and an atmosphere mixed with helium and oxygen that allows the divers to work at pressure.
When Brooke returns from her first shift in the diving bell--attached to the chamber's "Wet Pot" (bathroom/shower area)--she finds one of the crew has mysteriously died in his bunk. Their job cut short, the divers must wait four days to decompress in the chamber, but before they can leave, another teammate dies. Dean shrinks the traditional locked-room mystery, and delivers both a well-researched primer on saturation diving (readers will never think of "raspberry jam" the same way again) and a chest-contracting novel with well-developed characters and dialogue. The Chamber is a superb thriller that invites readers inside to experience fear in a new way. --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer and copywriter in Denver