Here are some customer reviews of
Riptide
: I bought this book on Saturday afternoon and finished it Monday night. Excellent treasure hunt story. Reminded me a lot of Wilbur Smith's Seventh Scroll but not quite as good.
 Childs & Preston do this style of book so well. I gulped it down in 2 bites, loving every minute of it's fast paced action "Tale". Pirates treasure, mystery illnesses, scary bad & good guys. Fun summer read.
These two authors are top-notch. After finishing Riptide I can't wait to read their next novel. Riptide is captivating! A genuine page-turner toward the end. Most of the chapters are filled with suspense. I was kept guessing till the very end!
I first read Child and Preston's The Relic a few months before its horrible counterpart of a movie came out, and I decided that it was perhaps the best book I had ever read outside of Stephen King's Dark Tower Series. I bought its sequel, Reliquary, with high expectations, and I was not let down. I saw this book in the bookstore and almost bought it once, but I did not really understand the plotline at all from the synopsis, so I refrained from purchasing it at that time. I saw the hardback edition on sale in the local bookstore about a year later (I have this urge to buy just about any good book--or presumably good book--that is in hardback for my collection) and so, of course, I bought it, expecting the best from such fantastic authors. Once again, they did not let me down. Riptide is, if you can't figure it out as I could not, a story about a high-tech treasure hunt for two billion dollars worth of "Red Ned" Ockham's treasure, buried at the bottom of the lethal, ingenious piece of architecture known as the Water Pit, on the gloomy Ragged Island, off the coast of Maine. The main character and owner of Ragged Island, Dr. Malin Hatch, is not a great hero or anything, and I did not like him as much as the characters in Relic or Reliquary, but he was okay. He is approached early on by the enigmatic treasure hunter Captain Neidelman, who wants to find the Ragged Island treasure. I truly expected Neidelman to be the great savior of them all, but it does not turn out that way. They do begin the hunt, though, and it starts out nice and orderly, but chaos quickly develops, and the body count rises. Is it a curse, or is a perfectly explainable force killing these people? I won't tell you. Anyway, the characters are not very deep, and you don't really care about it when they die (well except for maybe one), but it is still a great read, and it includes some cool new weapons (however unbelievable it might seem for some of them, such as explosive harpoons on the command ship). I would recommend this book to just about anyone.
The legend of Ragged Island off the coast of Maine started due to the discovery of a "water pit" over two centuries ago that have stymied engineers ever since. The legend that has evolved around the "water pit" is that a notorious but successful pirate buried his treasure (estimated to be worth over $2 billion in present money) underneath the island, but set it up so that the maze of tunnels would constantly flood. Various efforts to extract the treasure have failed, leading to the deaths of several individuals. Dr. Malin Hatch, whose brother died thirty years ago in an attempt to excavate the treasure, leads a high-tech team in the latest effort to find the pirate's treasure. This time around, with computers, infra-red photography, an experienced treasury recovery team, and stronger metals like titanium available, success seems inevitable. However, human greed leading to treachery may prove more perilous to Hatch than the pit. There is also the realization that if by some miracle they can reach the treasure, what awaits them may turn out to be more hazardous to Malin and his accomplices than the pit could ever be. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, writers of THE RELIC, have scribed a fast-paced, action-packed adventure story loosely based on the infamous Oak Island pit. The characters, including the villainous "Water Pit", are more stereotypes than authentic people, but surprisingly that seems to add to the overall suspense. The crisp story line of RIPTIDE will be devoured by fans of the action novel, who will ultimately want to see the movie version too. Harriet Klausner
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