The Titanic Secret
(Libby/OverDrive eAudiobook)

In the prologue of the engrossing 11th Isaac Bell adventure from bestseller Cussler and Du Brul (after 2017's The Cutthroat), a lawyer from a firm possessing a secret report written decades earlier by detective Isaac Bell gives the report to Dirk Pitt, the director of the National Underwater and Marine Agency (and the hero of another Cussler series), in present-day New York City. The report concerns Bell's investigation into the mining of a secret ore called byzanium and the effort to smuggle it aboard the Titanic. Pitt is the report's recipient because of his efforts to salvage the Titanic (see Cussler's 1976 novel, Raise the Titanic!). The report constitutes the main narrative, which opens in 1911 with Bell in Colorado investigating a series of robberies when he's asked to look into the death of nine workers in a flooded mine. Bell's search for answers takes him to Iceland, where he teams with Ragnar Fyrie, the skipper of a whaler. Bell and Fyrie travel to the Arctic to pick up a thousand pounds of high-grade byzanium. Along the way, Bell battles a French company, the Société des Mines, and its chief thug while conducting a rescue that's as deadly as the ore they seek. The novel concludes with a touching epilogue and postscript set in the present that hints at the possibility of more to come on the mystery of byzanium. Cussler fans won't want to miss this one. Agent: Peter Lampack, Peter Lampack Agency. (Sept.)

Cussler and Du Brul circle back to Cussler's Raise the Titanic (1976) in the latest derring-do adventure featuring Isaac Bell (The Cutthroat, 2017).Dirk Pitt of the National Underwater and Marine Agency bookends the tale with the prologue and epilogue, but the story belongs to Bell. In the present day, Pitt discovers the diary of the Van Dorn Detective Agency's top investigator, "perhaps the greatest detective of hisor anygeneration." Pitt reads that in 1911, Bell was hired to find out whether nine men have faked their deaths in the Little Angel mine disaster in Colorado. Then he's hired to help the miner Joshua Hayes Brewster smuggle a thousand pounds of the ore of "a rare element called byzanium" to the United States from Novaya Zemlya, the "hellhole" island in the Russian arctic where the miners really are. But not so fastpeople are already trying to kill Bell before he leaves Colorado. Once safely across the pond, he hires an Icelandic whaling skipper who knows how to navigate the deadly ice floes to bring him to a desolate Russian mine and return everyone and the ore to Scotland and ultimately to America. On the island, Bell finds eight desperately ill men who appear "not unlike the dead" because the mineral is radioactive. But it's worth more than $1 million per ounce and has unknown and possibly great potential. Meanwhile, that round trip is no day in a dinghy. Bell blows up icebergs to avoid being icebound, wards off a 10-foot-tall polar bear, parries attacks from a French vessel, and deals with fire, betrayal, and plenty of murder. He deals with one disaster after another with smarts, bravery, loyalty, honesty, and no small amount of luck. When it's all over, he wants to return to his dear wife, Marion, in America, but business before pleasure. And yes, all of this connects to the Titanic in the title.The fun begins with the prologue and doesn't stop till the end. Too bad the heroes can never meet. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The mega-best-selling Cussler, here teaming with "Philip Mercer" author Du Brul, brings together protagonists from two of his popular series—Isaac Bell and Dirk Pitt—who work a century apart to solve the world's worst maritime disaster.