The Chamber by Will Dean

 

A team of six saturation divers face a job where they are confined together, under extreme pressure, to a small capsule. Shortly after the job begins one of them is dead. Was it natural causes or murder?

Will Dean has produced the ultimate in locked room mysteries with his latest offering, The Chamber. The protagonists are saturation divers, they live in a small chamber on the deck of a ship. The chamber has been pressurised to match the depth at which they will be working on the sea bed and takes days to change back to normal. The chamber is one room, the size of an SUV, and a separate ‘wet pot’ for bodily functions and showering. With six people in such a confined space, with nowhere to hide, we are faced with a locked room mystery that leaves no corner to hide.

The story is told from the perspective of Ellen Brooke, the only female among the team of six. Ellen knows four of the other divers, they’ve all worked together at one time or another. The job is so specialised that the field of suitable candidates is small. The sixth diver, Tea-Bag, is new, it’s only his second saturation dive. Within hours of being in the pressurised chamber, Tea-Bag is discovered dead in his bunk. The group are faced with two problems; firstly, it will take four days to return the pressure in the chamber to normal, and secondly, how did their colleague die?

As the crew grapples with their enforced confinement, we learn how dangerous their job actually is. Not only do they face peril from the things we expect, they also have to deal with issues we would consider to be minor. The pressure means that the chamber is a hothouse where bacteria can multiply rapidly. The divers must ensure that everything is kept scrupulously clean. Being so reliant on everyone doing their utmost to ensure everyone is kept safe, along with the specialised nature of their job, gives a sense of camaraderie. As they begin to wonder if that trust is misplaced a sense of paranoia begins to set in, showing us that the dangers are psychological as well as physical.

Confined quarters and growing distrust leads to introspection. The surviving divers share memories of some of the jobs they have worked on previously and this makes for grim reading as we learn about the disturbing reality of some well-known maritime disasters. Thankfully, Will Dean doesn’t go overboard with the descriptions.

The conclusion becomes a life-or-death race against time, with the claustrophobia and tension building to the point of explosion. My nerves were on edge as I was willing away the minutes until the hatch could be opened and the truth revealed.

The Chamber by Will Dean will be published on 6^th June 2024 in hardback, ebook and audio format. My thanks to NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for a review copy.

Author Details

Will Dean grew up in the East Midlands and had lived in nine different villages before the age of eighteen. After studying Law at the LSE and working in London, he settled in rural Sweden where he built a house in a boggy clearing at the centre of a vast elk forest, and it’s from this base that he compulsively reads and writes. His debut novel, Dark Pines, was selected for Zoe Ball’s Book Club, shortlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker prize and named a Daily Telegraph Book of the Year. Red Snow was published in January 2019 and won Best Independent Voice at the Amazon Publishing Readers’ Awards, 2019. Black River was shortlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Award in 2021. The Last Thing to Burn was released to widespread acclaim in January 2021. First Born was published in 2022.