Summary
High seas explorer Dirk Pitt must stop an American millionaire from using impoverished nations for his own personal experiments in this #1 New York Times -bestselling action adventure series.
A routine survey mission over the North Atlantic exposes a missing luxury yacht frozen inside a million-ton mass of ice. The ship had vanished en route to a secret White House rendezvous, making it the responsibility of the National Underwater and Marine Agency to find out what happened. In other words, it's time for Dirk Pitt to cut his sunny, California vacation short and get back to work.
Of course, when Pitt arrives on the scene and discovers the charred remains of the entire crew, who burned alive but never left their posts, he begins to suspect the tragic loss of the ship to be only the first, deliberate step in a far more sinister plan.
Clive Cussler was born in Aurora, Illinois on July 15, 1931. He attended Pasadena City College for two years before enlisting in the United States Air Force during the Korean War. After his discharge from the military, he worked first as a copywriter and later as a creative director for two of the nation's most successful advertising agencies. At that time, he wrote and produced radio and television commercials that won numerous international awards, including one at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.
He began writing in 1965 and published his first novel featuring Dirk Pitt in 1973. His first non-fiction work, The Sea Hunters, was published in 1996. He has written over 50 books including the Dirk Pitt series, the NUMA Files series, Oregon Files series, Isaac Bell series, and the Fargo Adventure series.
He is the Chairman of NUMA (National Underwater and Marine Agency), a non-profit group which he founded. He and his crew of marine experts and NUMA volunteers have discovered over 60 historically significant underwater wreck sites.
Clive Cussler died on February 24, 2020 at the age of 88. (Bowker Author Biography)