The Silent Sea

January 25, 2010
In the winning seventh entry in the Oregon Files nautical adventure series from bestseller Cussler and Du Brul (after Corsair
), Juan Cabrillo, the heroic skipper of the Oregon
, a state-of-the-art warship disguised as a tramp steamer, faces a multitude of difficulties and challenges. A fabulous pirate treasure may lie at the bottom of a deep well on Pine Island in Washington State. In Argentina, a junta of generals has seized power and turned the country into a police state with designs on the rest of South America. The discovery of the remains of a WWII-era blimp in the Argentine jungle ups the ante. At the bottom of the sea off Antarctica, where the Argentines have opened a secret oil field, lies a huge, ancient Chinese vessel, which could help the Chinese, who are in league with the Argentines, in any legal claim to Antarctic territory. The action seesaws from subtropical jungles to the bitter cold of the Antarctic as Juan leads his band of intrepid scientist warriors into battle against a host of nefarious enemies. A cliffhanger ending will leave fans panting for more.

March 1, 2010
The seventh Oregon Files adventure thriller begins on December 7, 1941, when five boys encounter tragedy while looking for buried pirate treasure on a small island off the coast of Washington State. Flash-forward to today: Juan Cabrillo, captain of the Oregon (a high-tech vessel posing as a tramp freighter), is in Argentina, trying to recover a downed NASA satellite. Well, dont you know, Juan stumbles on something he totally didnt expect to find, and soon hes chasing after the secrets of an ancient curse that might still be causing trouble. Fast-paced and a lot of fun, the latest Cabrillo novel delivers the wallop Cusslers fans have come to expect. Cabrillo himselfhe shares his name with a sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer, by the waymakes a fine protagonist, sharp-witted and two-fisted. Considering the Oregon Files novels involve action, exploration, and high-tech gadgetry, its surprising no one has turned them into movies yet. The prolific Cussler, who, like James Patterson, now employs coauthors (Du Brul in this case), is often accused of writing by the numbers, but this time those numbers add up to entertaining fare for high-adventure fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)