The Wrecking Crew: A Novel

By: Taylor Zajonc

Narrated by: Steve Carlson

In exchange for his freedom from a secret Moroccan prison, deep-water salvage diver Jonah Blackwell agrees to lead a covert search for a missing research team in the dangerous coastal waters of Somalia, an area plagued by pirates and a deadly red tide killing all marine life within its reach. But when his expedition threatens the ambitions of billionaire industrialist Charles Bettencourt, Jonah’s survival depends on hijacking a hostile submarine and assembling an unproven crew who must simultaneously investigate the source of a mysterious oceanic plague and face down Bettencourt’s commandos.

A thrilling, fast-paced adventure set in the world’s last frontier, The Wrecking Crew will resonate with James Rollins and Clive Cussler fans alike.

©2016 Taylor Zajonc (P)2020 Taylor Zajonc

Well done!

Very well read and executed. There were a couple of parts that left you hanging until later in the book, but everything was very well done.

Cheers

Meganworks

Full Throttle

The first I heard of Taylor Zajonc was the short story “The Sea Tower,” published in New Maps, a magazine dedicated to deindustrial fiction. It was perhaps the best entry in a volume full of good stories, a quiet and pensive tale about a teenager abducted by her father to live on a converted oil rig.

The Wrecking Crew is also a quiet and pensive tale… for five seconds, then the scientist’s research plane goes down over the Somali coast and her son sneaks a master diver out of a secret Moroccan prison to get the body but the diver’s like “no first we steal the superyacht,” so they go off to do that but there’s a cute Texan and an evil billionaire and… and so on, and so on, with solid prose, for eleven hours. Zajonc’s creative process for this one probably involved heavy use of the phrase “f--- it, why not?”

I want to be clear: I’m not dumping on this book. I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s a fast-paced, cheerfully implausible thrill ride. Novels of this type aren’t usually my thing, but The Wrecking Crew is as good as, or better than, any I’ve read. Wrecking Crew #2 is both on Audible and my Wish List. It'll be my first go-to when I get tired of heavier stuff and want to hear about a man escaping gunfire by driving a truck off a dock so he can swim to a submarine.

Steve Carlson’s narration is great. I felt he not merely read, but enriched the story and characters, especially that of Bettencourt.

Insultingly stupid.

Weak, a not at all believable plot. I get the genre it’s trying to fit into but this is plain stupid and boring Character development is cartoonish.