97 Books Like The Mediterranean Caper

I love this book despite the incredible discomfort I experience every time I read it.

Diving in the cold waters of the North Atlantic on a good day is no picnic. But diving deep into the wreck of a mystery U-boat, not knowing if you are going to come out? Epic.

I just recently listened to the Audible book while driving back from an undersea research project in a van filled with young scientific divers. The climax had us all squirming in our seats!

This epic adventure is, hands down, my favorite nonfiction book of all time.

Not only does it tell the harrowing story of the SS Central America’s sinking through the eyes of its survivors, but it also tells the equivalently riveting story the search and recovery effort. As the title explains, this is the richest wreck in history. But recovering all that wealth from depths previously unvisited, using technologies developed on the fly specifically for the recovery? Incredible.

I could not put it down and have returned to it many times. Drop whatever you’re doing and go read this book!

I love mysteries, undersea adventures, and books that transport me to new places. This book does it all.

I first read it when I moved to New England for graduate school many years ago. As a new research diver living on Cape Cod, reading about Aristotle's “Soc” Socarides’ adventures introduced me to the region, both above and below the ocean’s surface.

The story was so compelling that on weekends, I would dive in the morning and then spend the afternoons driving around trying to find the locations featured in the novel. 

I love how journalist Susan Casey takes us inside this story and ultimately becomes part of it while revealing remarkable facts about white sharks and the scientists who study them. As a journalist, I can relate to how her obsession almost drew her too deep into a largely unknown and dangerous place inhabited by an animal that was as much myth as reality to her before she came face to face with it.

There is a lot to like about this book, but for me, ultimately, the immediacy, honesty, and vividness of her writing made me unable to put it down.

As I did with the first twenty-four books by Lee Child, I have read all of Cussler’s original works, not those that were supposedly “co-written.” I loved them, and I remember this as being the one that I loved best. I always enjoyed how these grand action thrillers began with a prologue that seemed to have nothing to do with the plot until later, when the reader would think, “Oh wow. That was a brilliant connection!”

I recall Dirk Pitt as a tall and strong hero with no extra weight on his body, a resourceful, likable man who couldn’t do without his tough and loyal sidekick, Al Giordino. After one of these international adventures, Pitt would always stagger back to his car museum, have a tequila on ice, a roll in the hay with his lady friend, sleep for 24 hours, and then it was back to the battlefield. And… show more.

I chose this for the power of hook and title. This action & adventure novel with historical elements has the greatest title in the history of literature.

The purpose of a title is to sell the book, and no title ever succeeded so well. Raise the Titanic! was published a decade before the wreck of Titanic was discovered, so in the world’s imagination the ship was still largely intact. Cussler tapped into the intoxicating idea of the legendary ship’s resurrection and the completion of its maiden voyage.

I was so struck when I saw Raise the Titanic! in a bookstore, I decided to buy it before I picked it up. The book propelled Cussler from moderate success to the best-selling grandmaster of adventure, and it inspired my search for a hook and title.

An ill-timed robbery and a mysterious ghost train—both from 1914—and the present day CIA and MI6: All are perfectly normal, abnormal elements to this Clive Cussler novel.

I especially like this book for its ties to recent American history. It flirts with elements of espionage and the crackerjack job of merging a confounding prologue with a mystery that needs solving. There is a combination of Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels that have influenced my own story-telling, and this one is among them.

Cussler penned an entire series around his National Underwater and Marine Agency Projects Director, Dirk Pitt. Nearly every one of the novels begins with an event of the distant past that culminates in the present. This novel follows that pattern but involves political concerns regarding the North American Continent. While Cussler’s characters only occasionally rise to the challenge of emotionally involving me, his plots—the twists, turns, and historical antecedents—always… show more.

One of Cussler’s earlier novels featuring Dirk Pitt, Cussler sends his erstwhile hero deep into a desert landscape where he throws all manner of problems at them.

As Pitt and co battle to survive the harsh conditions, they are tested to the limit as they must not only escape the arid landscape, but do in time to foil a dastardly plot. While perhaps not as much of a literary heavyweight as some of the other authors mentioned on this list, Cussler is brilliant at writing a rollicking good yarn.

I read this while living in Korea, so the sinister Asian shipping empire theme inspired me at a time when I was learning to write sea adventures myself. Deep Six also involves the Aleutian Islands, which is another place where I have lived and worked. These coincidences caused me to identify with the book, but Cussler is a master storyteller, which brought it all together.

Most people know Clive Cussler for his Dirk Pitt series and the movie Saraha, but Clive has several series going and the Eye of Heaven showcases one of my favorites, the Fargo series. This follows 2 multimillionaires with rapier wit and insatiable curiosity as they travel the globe unraveling historical finds.

I love the romance, and there is plenty of action, and all the plots have some plausible connection to a real or (close to real) historical event and, of course, the bad guys trying to stop them. The couple is altruistic and always puts what they find in its rightful place. But they are all a delightful, adventurous romp across the globe.