Willard Price returns beneath the waves for the next thrilling adventure in the series, this time at Australia's Great Barrier Reef. This is the only book that embraces fantasy full-on with its fictitious Underwater City where civilians live out their daily lives. Although a city of this scale never existed, the idea was inspired by the Sealab experiments that ran throughout the 1960s by the US navy to create livable, breathable underwater habitats. The whole project was eventually scrapped after a sabotage and murder attempt by a mentally unbalanced crew member, a plot worthy of a Willard Price novel! There is a certain charm to the book's naive optimism for using the ocean to solve man's problems. We have not reaped a bountiful harvest from the sea to cure world hunger, nor have we addressed problems of overcrowding.
The weakness of this book is Price forgetting details from previous adventures. For instance, discoveries about the killer whale meant that he retconned the scene in Whale Adventure where a pod attacks the boys. Perhaps he hoped readers wouldn't be reading the books in sequence, or notice. The new killer whale is portrayed as a human-loving, overgrown dolphin that can be trained by sticking one's head in its mouth. There are various instances of the characters suffering from plot amnesia and relearning things they already discovered. The villainous pearl trader Merlin Kaggs makes a reappearance, posing once again as a missionary, but he's rather underused this time round. The scenes with the boys collecting poisonous specimens and being stung in the process is definitely the highlight.
Rating: 4/5
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