The Chamber by Will Dean

5 Stars from me! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Having read and been forever traumatised by loved The Last Thing to Burn, I am always reluctant keen to read a new Will Dean book and so was delighted to find The Chamber.

The tension that pours out from the pages of this book is immeasurable.

I was already on edge once I realised that Ellen was in the chamber with five male divers, that set me on the journey to feeling uncomfortable right from the get go. Add in the dangers – everywhere – so many dangers. Add in the fact that there can only be an excruciatingly slow ascent back to the surface if anything goes wrong, and you are already reading and tense and highly pressured book.

But.

Then add in that one by one members of the team start to die and suddenly this becomes hell on earth (well, hell in the sea). I trusted NO ONE and simply had to keep reading as the painfully slow timers ticked down.

The Chamber is yet another Will Dean masterpiece and I am already recommending it to people – shortly followed by the words (in a lower, more sombre voice) did you ever read The Last Thing to Burn…

Huge thanks to @NetGalley for an ARC copy in return for an honest review.

Blurb: HIGH PRESSURE OUTSIDE

On a boat heading out into the North Sea, Ellen Brooke steels herself to spend almost a month locked inside a hyperbaric chamber with five other divers. They are all being paid handsomely for this work – to be lowered each day inside a diving bell to the sea bed, taking it in turns to dive down and repair oil pipes that lie in the dark waters. It is a close knit team and it has to be: any error or loss of trust could be catastrophic.

EXTREME PRESSURE INSIDE

All is going to plan until one of the divers is found unresponsive in his bunk. He hadn’t left the chamber. It will take four more days of decompression, locked away together, before the hatch can be opened. Four more days of bare steel, intrusive thoughts, and the constant struggle not to give way to panic. Mind games, exhaustion, suspicion, and, most of all, pressure. And if someone does unlock the door, everyone dies…

And Then There Were None meets The Last Breath in this tense and suspenseful locked-room thriller from the author of the “astonishing” (Ian Rankin) The Last Passenger.