Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Penguin Group, and author Graham Brown for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

A long, long time ago I can remember reading some of the Dirk Pitt adventures by Clive Cussler. For whatever reason, I stopped paying attention to the series after a while, until I saw this book. No, Clive Cussler didn’t write it. He died in 2020. However, there are authors now writing books based on the world he created. Dirk Pitt isn’t here, but an intriguing staff now works for NUMA pressing on with the work I remember from those earlier books.

In Desolation Code, Kurt Austin and Joe Zavala of NUMA are called to investigate a mass stranding of marine wildlife on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean. While they are able to direct island officials and residents in helping save some of the stranded marine life, there are more questions than answers as to why this happened.

While there, they get a signal from a NUMA marine beacon. What’s strange is that this beacon is sitting in NUMA Headquarters in Washington DC. The group of NUMA scientists split up as Kurt and Joe follow the beacon. The rest of their crew is researching what might have driven the marine life to strand themselves on the beaches like that.

All of this makes for an intriguing mystery that involves artificial intelligence, cloning, and a megalomaniacal villain intent on creating a new version of life on Earth.

Desolation Code is a thriller and it delivers well in that regard. Since I wasn’t knowledgeable about recent entries in this series, it took a while for me to really get into it. It does stand well on its own, though. There’s no reason you would have to have read other books in the series to really grasp what’s happening. Some of the characters have pasts that are alluded to, but the author fills in enough of the background that I wasn’t lost while reading it. There’s a big science fiction element to the book involving computers, artificial intelligence, and cloning. I think people who aren’t tech-aware could get lost in that respect.

The characters are mostly portrayed with depth. I say mostly because while the NUMA crew has a good background, the villain and his cohorts are typical of the kind I’ve seen in many other stories, including many James Bond movies. The explanation for how he was able to reach this point in time with his experiments and projects is rather implausible. Imagine having some of the greatest scientific minds working for someone, and then they disappear without a trace. They have families, and yet no one ever questions them disappearing from the face of the earth. I can’t imagine that even the places they worked previously wouldn’t notice their absence, either, since so much scientific discovery is proprietary. There’s a bit of a suspension of disbelief in that area and a number of others.

However, I did enjoy Desolation Code quite a bit. It’s a good thriller that does raise some ethical questions about the future we may be facing with our technological advances. It was an easy, fun read for me.