I've decided that I want to be Clive Cussler when I grow up. Cussler is generally recognized as the Master of the American action novel, with 18 consecutive best sellers; he is internationally renowned as an authority on shipwrecks and their recovery; and, in his spare time (yeah!) he collects classic automobiles. If a 25 hour day is ever devised, I have a feeling that the patent will have Cussler's name on it. His partner in letters, Paul Kemprecos, is no slouch in the literary world himself, having written a number of detective thrillers set in the undersea world and having been awarded a Shamus award for his efforts.

FIRE ICE is Cussler's and Kemprecos' latest NUMA adventure, a fictionalized account of Cussler's own National Underwater Maritime Agency. What Cussler does so well in each of his novels is to start things off from several different, and apparently unrelated, points of view and gradually bring the divergent points together. So, too, does FIRE ICE begin in Odessa, Russia in 1918 with the sinking of a rusty merchant ship, then shift to the sudden, apparently inexplicable occurrence of a tsunami on the Maine coast and then proceed to the hijacking of a mini-research submarine in the Aegean Sea before reintroducing Kirk Austin, intrepid hero of the previous NUMA novels, SERPENT and BLUE GOLD.

FIRE ICE combines the best elements of the James Bond and Tom Swift novels, tossing in a boatload of real science along the way. You never would have slept through your general study science and history courses if you'd had professors like Cussler and Kemprecos guiding you through them. Each of the NUMA novels contains huge and frequent nuggets of knowledge, factoids thrown in amongst the derring do. I never knew what caused tsunamis or why they normally don't occur along the Atlantic coast. I also knew nothing at all about a proposed alternative fuel with the name methane hydrate, or FIRE ICE, that is located beneath the ocean floor but, due to its instability, is impossible, at this point, to harvest. And it is methane hydrate that brings the elements of FIRE ICE together.

The world is threatened in FIRE ICE when a brilliant madman named Razov, who believes himself to be a direct descendent of the last czar of Russia, devises a scheme to unleash a wave of premature global warming that will shift Earth's climatic balance, transforming the United States into a frigid wasteland and the frigid plains of Siberia into lush farmland, thus restoring the glory of Russia. Austin and an unlikely ally in the Russian government form an uneasy coalition to bring Razov's plan to the ground. Cussler and Kemprecos along the way create a classic good vs. evil scenario with enough suspense, danger, and explosions to fill any three books you could name. There aren't many authors doing these types of books anymore, and it's unfortunate; Cussler and Kemprecos, however, more than make up for the loss.

FIRE ICE continues the efforts of Cussler and Kemprecos to not only keep the action-adventure genre alive but also redefine it to a vessel of their own creation. Anyone who misses what were once known as "swashbucklers" or "ripping yarns" should take heart. Any book with the name "Cussler" on the spine will restore the spirit of adventure that such books so readily elicited.

   --- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

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