Are you claustrophobic? 

 

If there’s one thing you definitely can’t be if you want to be a saturation diver, it’s claustrophobic. You have to train even the slightest amount of animal instinct to back out of too-tight spaces out of your system in order to be a saturation diver. You also have to quickly grow okay with the idea of being packed into a very tight space (smaller than a train car) with five other fully-grown adults under increased pressure and temperature while you’re all up in each other’s business for about a month. 

 

Thank goodness we’re merely readers, so all we have to worry about is if these kinds of things trigger us before we read. If they don’t, then we just get treated to a suspense thriller about six saturation divers who go down in their chamber while in the North Sea and they start mysteriously dying. 

 

This is advertised as a locked-room mystery, but it really isn’t. If you go into this expecting it to be a traditional locked room, you’ll be disappointed. It’s closer to a closed-loop, but it’s not even truly that because there’s almost an element of possible conspiracy to the mystery in this story. Every time it seems as if the field of suspects has narrowed, Will Dean creates opportunities for the list of suspects to either widen or to shift, changing the perspective and/or the motive. 

 

That’s the largest part of the charm behind The Chamber: Divers, just like other people who live their lives on the sea and do their jobs based on a very strict set of rules and rituals, can be set very off course by ill omens and superstitions. One bad omen can shift a character’s (maybe more than one) entire point of view and it could roll into a completely unrelated event, tainting it with a seeming darkness that otherwise may not have colored it so. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

 

Or maybe it’s not all in your mind. Or maybe it’s both. 

 

Will Dean’s last two books have been absolutely bangers for me, but The Chamber left a little to be desired in the way of excitement for me. I felt the suspense. I felt the claustrophobia. I felt the paranoia and germaphobia. I felt the pressure, the heat, and the fear. For some reason, though, I didn’t feel engaged with the story or compelled to keep reading. The story lacked propulsion. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was while I was reading and I still can’t. I just felt like I could walk away from this book and it wouldn’t really matter. 

 

Will Dean is a wonderful writer and this is a great book, so I totally recommend it. I just didn’t feel like I needed to finish this story in order to get on with my life. This is a wonderful story, though. 

 

I was provided a copy of this title by Netgalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you. 

 

File Under: Murder Thriller/Psychological Thriller/Suspense Thriller