Dark Dive

Thanks to @netgalley for the advanced copy of this book!

My rating: ?????????

Dark Dive is the fifth book in the Underwater Investigation Unit series. Florida detective Sloan McPherson has been diving all her life, and now she uses those skills to solve murders, stop corruption, and help as many people as she can. But you can hide a lot of secrets in the dark waters of Florida, and this time it seems a missing friend was keeping secrets of his own. Sloan and her colleagues have to race to solve the disappearance before those secrets cause even more harm.

I'm a dive instructor in my spare time and there's no better place to be than underwater, so I love books that explore that world. And it's a perfect complement to mystery/thrillers. Mayne's writing is very straightforward and to the point, no frills. On one hand we get very little internal dialogue from the characters, so they don't feel incredibly fleshed out. On the other hand, this keeps the plot moving at a rapid pace, which is often what you want from a fast paced thriller.

On a technical aspect I was a bit frustrated when the character talks about taking oxygen tanks to depth as a backup - any diver knows that pure oxygen, when breathed below about 18 feet, will cause convulsions and drowning. Presumably the author meant oxygen enriched gases, but a non-diving reader wouldn't know that. You could argue it's not necessary to explain this for the story, but misinformation that can lead to death seems unnecessary - why not just say ‘tanks'? Also, there's a story line regarding a school and identity that are entirely unresolved. There's no mention at all at the end, so it's unclear if the author intends to delve further into it in the next book, or that plot line was just dropped, but it left me unsatisfied.

I did love the line where the main character mentions that she's way more worried about a boat driver ignoring a dive flag in the water than a shark... Amen to that. Those boaters are a menace.

All in all, it was an enjoyable thriller with some clunky parts, but they don't take away too much from the plot itself. It's a perfect weekend or airplane read when you want a little mystery, a little excitement, but you don't want to get too emotionally invested in a story.

Dark Dive will be released on March 12, 2024!