Jack Green, hero of Man In the Water, is a Pennsylvania salesman and spare-time conspiracy theorist. He married out of his league, and he and his beautiful wife Stacey have a five-year-old boy they adore. When Stacey gets some troubling medical news, her mother pays for them to take a Caribbean cruise, so they can have a carefree time together before facing whatever challenges will come.
It’s great until they’re attacked in their cabin one night, and Jack finds himself struggling for his life, only to return home alone and find his son missing. Realizing that the authorities are unwilling to do much about the case, Jack turns to a cop friend, who refers him to an FBI agent he knows. And suddenly all those conspiracies Jack has been talking about about take on new – and personal – meaning.
I suppose the first thing I should say about Man In the Water is that it was a page-turner. I kept with it to the end, in spite of elements I didn’t much care for. So the book succeeded in that respect.
But even as I read, I was nitpicking. The writing was pretty slapdash. Words are used imprecisely, as for instance, “qualms” where “doubts” is wanted. This is one of those stories where an ordinary guy gets thrown in among professional killers, which always raises the problem of how to get him out alive without overdoing the luck factor. In my opinion, the luck factor did get overdone here. And the action itself seemed cinematic and implausible.
Even worse, the book ends with a cliffhanger, its central plot problem unresolved. I don’t like that. Ongoing secondary plot threads are fine in a series, but you need to resolve this book’s main plot problem in this book. So that annoyed me.
I think this series is working on having a Christian theme. Jack is an agnostic, and he often spends time thinking about the God question. I would expect him to possibly come to faith further down the line.
But I won’t be reading down the line. Man In the Water wasn’t awful, and I did finish it. But I didn’t like it enough to spring for the sequel.