John Bandicut is in over his head this time, deep under an alien sea. In book three of the Chaos Chronicles, he and his company of friends have been tasked with settling a dispute between people of the sea, and land dwellers while trying to figure out what mysterious force living at the bottom of the abyss is trying to kill them all.

The under-sea habitat and cramped submarines in this story kept me feeling the need to seek wide open spaces and fresh air.

Carver tossed in a few snippets from the life of a character from book one and I believe that the story is only going to get more interesting from here on out. I'm looking forward to starting book four. ( )

Notably better than the two predecessors. Not without a few minor quirks of it's own - the female alien is particularly cringe worthy, and even worse predictably so. Meanwhile the interludes to John's ex-lover are unexplained, particularly as nothing comes of them. The 'voice' jumps about a bit more through several characters. However the plot is centred on just one location, which makes it directer and more action centred. It is definetly the best of the series so far. There is lots of 'Show' and very little tell which is how it should be.

John and co - and it's quite remarkable that he's suddenly the leader despite being the latecomer to the party. Discover that they've landed in an oceanic world after being kicked out of shipworld. Somethign is causing the amphibeous Neri to sicken and die, and something else is causing massive undersea qualkes that threaten their homes. Although the Neri feel it could be the 'landers' who eek out a living on the sparse surface, 'The Company' as they come to be called don't think so, and set about gathering more evidence.

The latest quarx is female for no explicable reason. But this fails to add any interest to the alien sex scenes. There's some attempt at better descrioptions of technoogy but these remain unconvincing. Despite the publisher's (author's?) assurtions that this is hard SF, it isn't. It's character driven social/soft SF. But none the worse for it. If the first couple of books had held up to this standard I'd recommened the whole series more widely. ( )