Dark Watch

Juan Cabrillo, captain of the Oregon and Chairman of the Corporation, accepts a job to find and stop a ring of pirates that are preying on ships in the Pacific Ocean. Their state of the art ship is disguised to lure the pirates. When that inevitably happens, they sink the pirate ship and manage to save a large container that had been on the deck. After they open it they discover it is filled with dead bodies, probably migrants trying to escape to better conditions. They also find a sinking ship that still has one passenger alive and must perform some tricky steps to get her out before it sinks.

Dark Watch is action-packed and never slows down until the final scene. The story line feels more like a Mission Impossible movie than a novel, show more but is fun to follow as Cabrillo and his crew save themselves in some pretty tension-filled scenarios. I was not much of a fan of the first two books in this series, which Cussler wrote with Craig Dirgo. The change to new co-author Jack du Brul was a great move and added some real character development to the mixture. Fans of the Oregon Files will enjoy this latest adventure to stop an international banking syndicate who plan use murder as a business tool to build up their human slave trade. show less

Juan Cabrillo, captain of the Oregon and Chairman of the Corporation, accepts a job to find and stop a ring of pirates that are preying on ships in the Pacific Ocean. Their state of the art ship is disguised to lure the pirates. When that inevitably happens, they sink the pirate ship and manage to save a large container that had been on the deck. After they open it they discover it is filled with dead bodies, probably migrants trying to escape to better conditions. They also find a sinking ship that still has one passenger alive and must perform some tricky steps to get her out before it sinks.

Dark Watch is action-packed and never slows down until the final scene. The story line feels more like a Mission Impossible movie than a novel, show more but is fun to follow as Cabrillo and his crew save themselves in some pretty tension-filled scenarios. I was not much of a fan of the first two books in this series, which Cussler wrote with Craig Dirgo. The change to new co-author Jack du Brul was a great move and added some real character development to the mixture. Fans of the Oregon Files will enjoy this latest adventure to stop an international banking syndicate who plan use murder as a business tool to build up their human slave trade. show less

The large cast of characters has been cut and I hope the new character of Tory(Victoria) ends up joining The Corporation. She is smart, sexy and can shoot-them-up just as good as the guys. It was great to finally see the human side of Juan and the chemistry between him and Tory was great. I hope future ones are just as good!

This is the 3rd book of the Oregon Files series by Clive Cussler. With this book, he has changed his co-author from Craig Dirgo to Jack duBrul. While the first two books were good, this one was so much better. The writing style was stronger, the plot had more tension and there was significantly more character development (yea!). Those who have read the first two books and gave up, I urge you to give the series another try.
I rated the first 2 books 4 each as they were fun, easy reads that kept my interest throughout in one of my preferred genres - despite rather anticlimactic endings. This one is well on its way to being 4.25 to 4.5 (assuming we could give partial stars) as it was a much more enjoyable read due to the improvements show more mentioned above.
Book Summary from GR: Cabrillo and his motley crew aboard the clandestine spy ship Oregon have made a very comfortable and very dangerous living working for high-powered Western interests. But their newest clients have come from the Far East to ask for Cabrillo's special brand of assistance: a consortium of Japanese shipping magnates whose fortunes are being threatened by brutal pirates trolling the waters of Southeast Asia.
Normally, such attacks on the high seas are limited to smaller ships and foreign-owned yachts-easy targets on the open ocean. Now, however, giant commercial freighters are disappearing. But when Cabrillo confronts the enemy, he learns that the pirates' predations hide a deadly international conspiracy-a scheme of death and slavery that Juan Cabrillo is going to blow out of the water. show less

The third book in the Oregon Files series confirmed two things: First, Jack Du Brul is a much better writer than Craig Dirgo. Second, the Oregon Files are just not as interesting as the Dirk Pitt and Kirk Austin novels. The best part of Dark Watch was the Mission Impossible sequence near the middle of the book (recall that was also the best part of Golden Buddha, the first book in the series), but it ended far too briefly. The series has so many characters that very few are properly fleshed out. Also, the detailed "problem" identified by some of the villains early in the book is never actually resolved.

I quite enjoyed this adventure story up until the final 50 pages and then basically both the storyline and the decriptive writing became more and more confusing. Juan Cabrillo is a good substitute character for Cusslers' other superhuman hero, Dirk Pitt, but I don't feel we get to know a lot about the other characters, paricularly the main opposition i.e. the Russian and the Indian. Cussler remains a good bedtime read after a hard days work ( a bit like a John Wayne movie) but needs to simplify his descriptive writing where shipping terms started to overwhelm me.

The 3rd book in The Oregon Chronicles. Juan accepts a contract to chase down some pirates and chases them down to save world commerce and the banking system. It's a fast paced thriller that won't let you put it down...not always believable, but that's OK. Our hero meets a girl near the end, but not much romance ensues. Ahhh?