Ocean of Fear: A geeky thriller that I could not put down

Author Helen Hanson describes her writing as “thrillers for geeks”

There’s a certain geek factor in all thrillers. Many thriller authors write loving descriptions of cars, guns, bullets, bombs, or bullets. I have read several descriptions by different authors about how a bullet bounces around inside a skull and precisely what it does to a human brain.

But I actually enjoyed the geek factor in Ocean of Fear. Hanson made the geeky-technical aspects integral not only to the plot, but also to one of the main characters. 

What makes a good thriller?

To make a thrill, an author needs to build tension. The readers have to care enough about the characters and believe the situation enough to say “Oh no, don’t do that! You shouldn’t have done that!”

When the tension snaps, the author has to surprise you. It’s not a thrill when you know what’s going to happen

There are a lot of those moments in Ocean of Fear.

Plot points

Like any good thriller, Ocean of Fear begins with a murder. Baxter Cruise (character names are not this author’s strong suit), a grad-school dropout turned email spammer, discovers UC Santa Cruz professor, Dr. Allesandra Bisch, dead in her office. Baxter’s employer, Professor Sydney Mantis, had given Baxter a flash drive and asked him to give it personally to Dr. Bisch, as well as to look after his, Mantis’s dog while he suddenly had to leave town for a few days.

The mystery is not who killed Dr. Bisch — the author introduces the assassin in Chapter 2. The mystery is why, and the tension rises as the main investigator, FBI Special Agent Claudia Seagal, puts the pieces of the puzzle together, and as Baxter gets pulled deeper and deeper into the trap laid for Dr. Mantis. 

Hanson knows how to ramp up a story by taking it in unexpected directions. It turns out that the professors, Bisch and Mantis, were developing robotic submarines for drug dealers to use to smuggle their product into the US. Special Agent Seagal. This is the geek factor: Hanson tells us enough about robotics and remote control to make the story work, so that we understand that this story just could not happen without this technical detail. However, she never gives too much, never bores us with technical factoids that we don’t need. Every word is a plot point.

Engaging and critical backstories

Despite their unfortunate names, the characters have interesting backstories. Hanson is also skilled at not drowning the reader in long information dumps, but revealing details about Claudia’s deceased husband, Baxter’s dead parents, Mantis’s habit of seducing students, even the bad guys’ back stories as they’re needed. Readers begin to feel for the characters, to hope that their plans work out. The sibling rivalry between the two main baddies really rang true.

Two weaknesses

There are only two weaknesses with this story. First, there are the character names. The author shows us in Chapter 1 that “Dr. Bisch” is an intentional joke, but then there are all the animal names: Dr. Mantis, Agent Seagall. I don’t know if this was an intentional gag, but while there are some humorous moments in the book, it’s not overall a comedy. It’s a thriller that takes engaging, believable characters on an exhilarating ride to an explosive and satisfying conclusion.

The other weakness was the cover. It’s professionally done, but maybe a little too clichéd. It gave away too much of the story, instead of making me want to open the book.

But those are minor flaws. In the end, Ocean of Fear is a good, satisfying read from a skilled author.

4 *.

Visit Helen Hanson's website and blog and learn about her books.

How we respond to tragedy



Image: Creative Commons

 My hopes and prayers go to the families of everyone killed, wounded and hurt, traumatized and terrified by the bombs in Boston on Monday. My sympathies go to everyone who is struggling through the clean-up, the aftermath and the traffic snarls as the city recovers from the cowardly sneak attack.
And for whoever planted the bombs, whoever encouraged and enabled the attack, I have only contempt and condemnation.

Every terrorist attack, every underhanded, gutless affront like this generates a hurricane of media. And when it happens in a major city in the biggest media source in the world, the US, we all know to expect a biblical flood of reportage. And we know that the media’s attention in general will be distracted from all sorts of other subjects, worthwhile of attention and less so, at least until the next shocking event diverts them again.

It’s fitting; this is an event worth our attention. And it’s right that all of us pause, for at least some time, in our normal daily routines.

But what should we put on hold? And for how long?

Getting slagged

Immediately following the bombing, I got a couple of messages from followers of this blog or my Twitter feed saying that I should hold off in my normal advertising because of the bombing and the innocent blood shed. I read that the Kardashians got scolded for continuing to Tweet about their vapid activities as the first news reports continued to trickle through the Web and the broadcast media.

My first reaction was: “Oh, right. Sorry — I’ll get right to correcting my automatic Twitter feed.” Then I thought: “Wait a minute. Why?”

I am not trying to capitalize on this tragedy. No one should ever even try to use it to promote himself or herself, or a product or service. It happened, and we have to acknowledge it, honour the memory of the innocents killed, hurt and scarred.

It’s also right, though, to look at the coverage, to think about and analyze and discuss our reactions. There is a lot to be learned, a lot worth learning from the aftermath.

My first impression of the news coverage of the terrible event was that it was better than what we got after earlier terror attacks on the US and elsewhere in the West. It seems to me that it’s been more rational and cautious with less jumping to conclusions about the perpetrators than after 9/11 or the foiled bombing in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, 2010.

Reaction

Should all of us suspend everything else we’re doing in response to this event? Should we refrain from our usual tweeting? For how long?

The Fox network has reportedly pulled an episode of Family Guy from broadcast and hulu.com because it depicts Peter Griffin running down runners at the Boston Marathon with his car.

I was chastised for tweeting a quote from a review of my novel, The Bones of the Earth, which mentions violence, gore, monsters and more.

I think that’s fair in the immediate aftermath; it does seem insensitive to be promoting fictional gore when most people’s attention is caught by the real-world variety and people are suffering.

On the other hand, that response gives the perpetrators of this crime exactly what they want.

Many years ago, I read a story called “Very Proper Charlies,” about how journalists around the world decided to stop covering any terrorist attacks. No matter what the damage or how many the casualties, the news ignored it. The result was that the terrorists eventually gave up, because attention was the reason they did what they did.

Sure, it was an exaggeration. But it still had a point: terrorism is a tactic to draw attention to a cause that has no other way of getting any. Whether it’s effective in the long term is a different discussion. But when the news media descend on a terrorist strike like crows on a corpse, the criminals are fulfilled.

And the more that we turn away from what we normally do, from the activities that build the world up and make it a better place, the more we hurt ourselves.

Let’s face it, terrorist acts happen all the time. People living in Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan and many other places around the world deal with checkpoints and continuous threat of bombings every single day. No one bashes Kim Kardashian for tweeting about her new sweater when bombs go off elsewhere.

We cannot stop our normal lives, working toward our goals, for every tragedy or crime that happens.

Maybe we should try treating terrorists like very proper charlies. Of course, that would not acknowledge the suffering of the victims.

It’s a difficult question. What do you think we should do? Leave your opinion in the Comments.

The difference between evil and crazy

Photo of Anders Behring Breivik being sentenced in Norway courtesy CBC.ca.

Today, a Norwegian court found Anders Behring Breivik legally sane and sentenced him to up to 21 years in jail, and possibly for the rest of his life, for his bomb and shooting spree last year that killed 77 people.

The case was unusual in many ways, not least because the prosecution was arguing that Breivik, was insane. The defendant argued he was sane and was waging a war against what he described as a Muslim invasion of Europe.

I have thought about that difference for a long time: where is that dividing line between “insanity” and “evil”? So many actions and ideas can be ascribed either description.

The epitome of evil-doer in modern pop culture is the serial killer, who is usually portrayed as mentally ill in some way — sociopathological, missing something in his or her mentality that prevents most of us from acting out those dark ideas, or damaged somehow by childhood abuse.

In reality, it seems that finding someone criminally insane suggests that we can cure the offender. If only we can give the right treatment, we can reform the offender, prevent him or her from doing those terrible deeds.

But what about evil? Is it a disease that we can cure? And what is evil?

This is a tricky question, one that greater minds than mind have struggled with for millennia. The question isn’t made easier by the shifting definition of evil over time and across the world. At one time, burning people alive was perceived as a good act, one that protected communities from contamination by evil or devilish ideas. Today in most of the Western world, the opposite reaction, tolerance, is perceived as the moral one.

In many parts of the world, the freedom of expression that the West so strongly defends is opposed by community leaders as a terrible evil, one that leads to community fracturing and moral degradation. When those proponents point to pornography, it’s easy to see their side.

However, trying to understand why someone would espouse an idea or take actions that we consider evil can lead us back to the original quandary. How can someone sane commit something so obviously evil as Breivik? What is wrong with his mind that can cause him to think that killing teenagers is defence of a culture?

The words

The questions of what evil is, and what we can or should do about it, are rich grounds for writers. I could write stories about this from so many different angles (if I had the time, of course). Can evil be cured with the right psychological treatment? If we could somehow cure all insanities, would we eliminate the serial killer, the murderer for pleasure? Or would another shift in cultural mores bring back the days of gladiatorial combat to the death for the pleasure of audiences?