Crescent Dawn - Softcover

Clive Cussler is the author of many New York Times bestsellers, most recently The Spy and Lost Empire. He lives in Arizona.

DIRK CUSSLER, has an MBA from Berkeley, worked many years in the financial arena and has been an active participant in the real-life NUMAŽ expeditions, and served as president of the NUMAŽ advisory board of trustees. He lives in Arizona.

Cussler’s umpteenth installment in the 40-year run of Dirk Pitt chronicles, now written with his son, the eponymous Dirk Cussler, has become as formulaic a franchise as the James Bond movies. In fact, Pitt is a Bond of the seas with similar exotic locales, scenery-chewing villains, over-the-top technology, and bodacious babes served with a bucket of testosterone—“shaken not stirred.” But with formula fiction, as with theme restaurants, it’s fun, and you always know what you’re getting. Cussler, the Cheesecake Factory of adventure writers, doesn’t disappoint in his latest, in which the bizarre cargo carried by a Roman galley in 327 CE and the mysterious explosion of a British battleship in 1916 have tremendous ramifications on the current political climate of the Middle East. Brother-and-sister baddies Ozden and Maria Celik aim to resurrect the Ottoman Empire, to which they lay claim as the allegedly last surviving royal heirs, by fomenting a fundamentalist uprising in Turkey and the surrounding Middle Eastern countries. But they’ll succeed only if they can keep Dirk Pitt and his NUMA (National Underwater and Marine Agency) team from discovering what was being transported in that ancient galley. High-Demand Back Story: A tried-and-true formula by a tried-and-true New York Times bestselling author will create its own stir. --Michael Gannon