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Dirk Pitt, Spe­cial Projects Direc­tor for the National Under­wa­ter and Marine Agency (NUMA) is sum­moned by the Navy to aid in the search for a top-secret sub­ma­rine. The sub, Star­buck, has gone miss­ing in an area called the Pacific Vor­tex, a coun­ter­part to the Bermuda Tri­an­gle. The searchers not only fail to find the sub, they are unable to find any trace of any of the almost forty ships known to have dis­ap­peared in the Vor­tex dur­ing the pre­ced­ing thirty years. Pitt’s inves­ti­ga­tion of the Star­buck — and the Pacific Vor­tex in gen­eral — leads him to van­ished sci­en­tists, leg­ends of a sunken Pacific civ­i­liza­tion, and a mys­te­ri­ous crim­i­nal mas­ter­mind known only as Del­phi.
Pacific Vor­tex! was the sixth Dirk Pitt novel to be pub­lished, but it was actu­ally the first one Cus­sler wrote. Indeed, its events take place before those of The Mediter­ranean Caper, Cussler’s first pub­lished novel. In a brief pref­ace, Cus­sler states that he was reluc­tant to pub­lish Pacific Vor­tex! because, among other rea­sons, “it does not weave the intri­cate plots of his [Pitt’s] later exploits.” Maybe I’m just get­ting sick of the for­mu­laic nature of the more recent books Cus­sler has “co-written” (what­ever that really means), but I liked this book because the plot wasn’t ridicu­lously intricate.