Book Review: The Chamber | Will Dean

A locked room mystery to the extreme! Will Dean’s mystery, The Chamber is essentially a reimagining of And Then There Were by Agatha Christie, but trapped inside of a hyperbaric chamber deep under the water. And by “deep under the water” I mean they are literally on the ocean floor. Do you feel the need to take a sudden, desperate breath? Me too. My claustrophobia is spiking just thinking about it!

What is The Chamber about?

And Then There Were None meets The Last Breath in this tense and suspenseful locked-room thriller that takes place inside a hyperbaric chamber from the author of the “brilliant, twisted, and oh so clever” (Chris Whitaker, New York Times bestselling author) novel The Last Thing to Burn.

Six experienced saturation divers are locked inside a hyperbaric chamber. Calm and professional, they know that rapid decompression would be fatal and so they work in shifts, breathing helium, and surviving in hot, close quarters.

Then one of them is found dead in his bunk.

With four days of decompression to go before the locked hatch to the chamber can be safely opened, the group must watch one another’s backs at all times. And when another diver is discovered unresponsive, everyone is on edge. What…or who…is taking them out one by one? And will any of them still be alive by the time the four days is up or will paranoia, exhaustion, suspicion, and pressure destroy them all?

What did I think?

Tense. Claustrophobic. Taut. That is how this mystery reads by design. The story centers around a group of divers who are trapped in a hyperbolic chamber on the ocean floor and only four days of decompression. And then someone dies, and it is clear it must be one of the five remaining divers. Not a great place to be trapped in general, but certainly not with a murderer!

What is worse—the high pressure pushing on them from outside of the chamber or the high pressure inside the chamber from an anonymous murderer? (Can I suggest that the answer is both?) If you aren’t sure how to picture a hyperbaric chamber, don’t worry. Dean does a masterful job at building the chamber in such a realistic way that you’ll feel you have been inside it. Hopefully not trapped inside it, though.

I had mixed feelings on the technical descriptions of saturation diving. On the one hand, I appreciated that the book was catching me—an uninformed reader—up. On the other hand, I sometimes felt the descriptions were a bit too much. That said, I learned a lot and certainly I learned enough to know I would absolutely never do that job. Never!

It turns out that there are a lot of ways one can die in a hyperbaric chamber, so as people start dying it seems possible that it could be environmental. But there is something just enough off about it that the divers begin to suspect it must be one of them.

I liked the book. It read as more claustrophobic and suspenseful than it did as a compelling mystery. Sometimes you can expect a dead character to actually be alive in these types of books, but that is clearly not going to be the case here as the remaining divers perform autopsies on the bodies. Yikes.

The ending is puzzling. I am still not sure I understand if I interpreted it correctly. I think I did, but then I’ve seen others who interpreted it entirely differently. Who is correct? I suppose we would need Will Dean to answer that. I also considered if it could be intentionally ambiguous, but it didn’t seem like it. A good twist with one of the characters made me rethink a few things, which is always the mark of a good twist. The ending wasn’t what I expected! But then again, perhaps I misunderstood it.