Raise the Titanic!

This is already making waves--a $40,000 advertising budget; $800,000 paperback sale, and guess what it will look like in shuddering Sensurround. Acutally it's not all that different from Iceberg (1975) and features the same hero, Dirk Pitt, insuperable in every situation, but it's a better story even if overabundantly plotted. The year is 1987 when the US has narrowed its search for byzanium (an esoteric metal like radium which can assure a perfect defense system and peace in our time) to a hold in the Titanic. Gene Seagram is working on this Sicilian Project; it gets a lot of interference along with that of Seagram's Dana who feels it interrupts her marriage. But the President decides to salvage the old ship. At the first 12,000 feet down a man is killed which warns them that the Russians aren't coming, they're there. So they are and it takes some doing to bring the Titanic into safe harbor with some of the fanfare of Op Sail. Wife Dana's aboard her for reasons best known to the author like a need for romance. However, watch it, since a readership which won't stop to come up for air has been indicated. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.