Treasure

Treasure was published in 1988 and is one of the Dirk Pitt novels Clive Cussler wrote around a marine salvage operation and the people who work for it. The books are adventure stories in the older sense: a competent professional, a piece of history nobody quite believes in, a salvage job, and a conspiracy that has to be stopped inside the length of the novel. The story moves from a wreck in the Greenland ice to the lost library of Alexandria and then to a plot aimed at the balance of power in the world.

The novel is built as a double chase. One line follows the historical material and the search for what has been hidden, which is the part that gives the book its title and its maps; the other follows the conspirators, who are organised, funded and willing to kill, and whose plans are set out in some detail. Pitt is the character who sees the connection between the two, and the story ranges between the Arctic, the Mediterranean and the United States.

Cussler's books were written to be read quickly, and this one treats research as part of the pleasure: charts, art, rare volumes, oil fields and shipping lanes all appear as concrete objects rather than as scenery. The series is long and the novels stand on their own, although the character and the agency carry from one book to the next. It belongs on this shelf as an example of the contemporary adventure thriller that took the older treasure-hunt form and gave it modern logistics.