Dangerous Ground

Military fiction at its finest. People in uniform are good, politicians bad, the US is awesome, everyone else sucks. Well, sarcasm aside, it's actually a rather good book in the genre. Just remember that it's fiction.

Jerry Mitchell suffers a bad airplane crash during training to become a naval aviator, and using his political connections get himself transferred to sub duty. This is not going over well with all his new colleagues and we get a fair dose of inter-personal strain as in any work place, but seasoned with some fires, radioactive waste and corruption.

A welcome submarine thriller author of the top drawer.

Started slowly and for a while it seemed like a rookie submariner 101 course and it took a while to get past that stage. The action in the latter stages of the book is more of a simmer than explosion but superb and seemingly ultra realistic.

This really is a thinking person's submarine tale.

Dangerous Ground is the first book in the Jerry Mitchell series. Jerry Mitchell is a naval aviator whose plans come to an abrupt halt with a blown tire and a crash of his Navy Hornet. Jerry decides that if he can’t ben an aviator, he wants to be a submariner and petitions the Navy to allow him to not only remain in the Navy but also to qualify for his dolphins. After having spent millions of dollars training Jerry to be a Navy pilot, the brass is reluctant to grant the request which would take yet more training and time so Jerry uses his family connection to a US Senator to get what he wants thereby ensuring that the Navy was going to make his qualification process exceeding hard and almost impossible.

Jerry is assigned to Memphis, a show more US submarine that – instead of being decommissioned as has been the plan over the past year – is sent out on a final mission to ensure the President’s political legacy as a strong environmentalist. That final mission takes the boat and the crew to the coast of Russia and into very dangerous territorial waters.

For those of you following my reviews, you know that I like character-driven stories – characters that you love, characters that you cheer for and characters that you despise (in a good way, of course) and this story had that. You have Jerry, who you root for when many on the sub are against him for using his political pull and getting a second chance that others may not have gotten; you have Captain Hardy, hard, demanding and irascible; there’s Lenny Berg, the drama major turned submariner and the list goes on.

The story was interesting, the people engaging and the crisis points tension filled. All of these, as well as my general liking for military stories, worked to get me through the very technical details of life on a submarine and the qualification process. And the acronyms…the military does love its acronyms…

Overall rating: 3.75 show less

Let's see. Hero is transferred from aviation branch thanks to influence by relative. Suffers abuse on board sub because of it. Mean but in the end kind captain. Hero overcomes hardships. Makes friends with girl on board (scientist checking out new prototype.) Helps evade attacking Russians. Lots of nifty technical detail. Mix all these standard plot elements together and you have a decent if many-times-done-before-story.

First edition as new