Book Review – Devil’s Gate

Start judging me.

Devil’s Gate is an adventure novel in author Clive Cussler‘s The NUMA Files. Co-written with Graham Brown

It is a chapter book, each chapter it’s own story, and only a few pages long. It’s like a DVD but in text and paper format with a lot less pictures.

The long story short;

The bad guys have built a partial accelerator, like the LHC but much more powerful, of course, and developed a particle beam weapon, of course.

And… particle beam weapons are good for line of sight, so the bad guys have also modified a super-tanker to be equipped with a beam deflector, of course, allowing them to deflect or bend the particle beam to over the horizon targets.

So anyway this super-tanker beam-deflector has installed in it the deflector array, and the super-cooled magnetic ring to generate enough deflection for the particle beam. To power this they’ve installed a couple nuclear reactors from submarines. Of course. It bobs about in the ocean, extends the array and deflects the particle beam to another target. Clever stuff.

But the clever engineers have also routed all the power of the nuclear reactors through the ship to provide power the thrusters, needed to keep the boat ‘on station’. Same phase, same power generator. Not powered from the ships turbine engines or anything, but through the same power phase that is needed for the super-cooled magnets and the array.

You can see where they went wrong.

The hero gets in a lucky shot with an axe to the power conduit for one of the thrusters, and shock!!!  the whole system goes down, the ship drifts, the super-cooling starts to warm and the array is flapping about in the wind.  We’re saved. Phew.  All that’s left is to escape in another submarine that’s stashed in the hold where the other bits aren’t.

It it was me I’d be asking for the money back from the design and engineering team that thought this power layout up.

Also in the book: Submarine races, underwater gas-axe escapes, paragliders and football stadiums, loose big-cats, a python,  Russian spies, gorgeous of course, and derring-do.

Only took a few hours to read, and is improbable and as impossible as it sounds.  Might try another one.

6 comments on “Book Review – Devil’s Gate”

1. kingmidget

   November 9, 2015

   

   Just read a book in Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series for the first time. Kind of the same thing although it’s a piece of bulletproof glass that is the technological advance that holds the key to the mystery that can only be solved by our man Reacher — who apparently is smarter, stronger, and well just pretty much better at everything than anybody else on the planet.

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   • Philip Walter

     November 9, 2015

     

     Oh he is. Reacher is a great character, math genius, as well, always has his folding toothbrush on him, I’ve read them all, always with a smirk.

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     • kingmidget

       November 9, 2015

       

       I read Personal, which is one of the more recent ones. I’m going back to the very first one to see what has changed. I can tell you that the smugness of Reacher will likely wear very thin and I’ll probably stop short of reading all of them.

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     • kingmidget

       November 9, 2015

       

       In fact, the more I look at him, the more I believe his eyebrows are fake. They don’t match the rest of his hair color. Who does that to themselves?

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     • Philip Walter

       November 9, 2015

       

       You’re going to need the companion book “Jack Reacher’s Rules” you can have a sneak peak at Amazon,
       http://www.amazon.com/Jack-Reachers-Rules-Lee-Child/dp/0345544293

       “Go to bed fully clothed so you are always ready for action”
       “If you are claiming up toward a trapdoor into an uncertain situation, catapult yourself up the last 18 feet as fast as you can”

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     • kingmidget

       November 9, 2015

       

       I’ll check it out. Thanks.

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