Bishop of Scorpius, The

Inhoud

A few miles off the coast of the Caribbean island of Scorpius, there are six SCUBA tanks resting on the ocean floor.

Meet P.T. Bishop, a thirty-something former minor-leaguer turned SCUBA shop owner with a slightly misaligned moral compass and a weakness for married women on vacation. Facing foreclosure and the threat of losing the only woman he’s ever cared about, Bishop is summoned to the newest and most luxurious resort on the island to meet with Tam-Lak, a Buddhist spiritual advisor who specializes in rehabbing the one percent. Desperate for money, Bishop agrees to take Tam-Lak on a mysterious night dive.

The dive sets into motion a series of events that revolve around six SCUBA tanks resting on the ocean floor and draw Bishop into a drug scandal with congressional implications. As the mystery of the tanks unravels, Bishop learns about his own past that includes a con-artist mother and a father he never met.

The Bishop of Scorpius is the first book of the Bishop Chronicles. Author Warner Sharp, a former Naval Officer has been diving for over 20 years. He’s worked as a SCUBA instructor in Mexico and the Bahamas.

Bespreking

A decent nautical thriller

P. T. Bishop is not really the guy who takes all his worries too seriously. Although his diving shop on the island of Scorpius is flirting with bankruptcy, he still manages to keep his spirits high. He knows he's one lucky guy. How many people can say that they love their job like he does? Seeing the faces of his students when they return from their first SCUBA dive is simply priceless. But his luck is about to change when the past of his most faithful employee Erika comes back to haunt her and everyone involved. In the meantime Bishop gets an offer he can hardly refuse: a simple night dive that will pay for most of his depths. This sounds too good to be true and indeed what he finds at the bottom of the ocean is only the beginning of an ever thickening plot.

The field of the nautical thrillers has already been harvested by many authors, with Clive Cussler definitely being the master. It seems too obvious to compare The Bishop of Scorpius by first-time author Warner Sharp with its predecessors, but the first part of the Bishop Chronicles is not that easy to place. Whereas most of these thrillers-at-sea quickly enter the area of an absurdly over-the-top and unrealistic James Bond-copy, it was clearly the intention of Sharp to avoid this trap. Although the final action sequence could do with a small reality check, the author kept the plot firmly hooked in reality. This makes this book an enjoyable read for those who prefer their stories to be believable. You can really feel the experience of the author, him being a former Naval Officer and diver for over 20 years.

Add to this a very fluent and compelling writing style and some very well drafted characters and you know you cannot go wrong with this book. My only hope is that for the next installment to the Bishop Chronicles, the author will go more for the broader scope and dare introduce some kind of global thread. But that might be just because at some level I like my heros to be a bit more like James Bond. A guilty pleasure, indeed.