Pressure Drop

by Peter Abrahams

Now acknowledged as perhaps the strongest of the new generation of thriller writers, Peter Abraham’s has found a striking new arena for action, adventure and suspense in the world of underwater diving: those mysterious caverns known as “blue holes” in the Bahamas.
The only thing Nina Kitchener misses in her life is a family. She has a great PR career, a best friend, a good life, but a lot of failed relationships with men and...a biological clock that is clanging away. Resolved to listen to it, she decides to have a baby on her own by artificial insemination and, following the advice of a reputable doctor, visits the distinguished but mysterious Human Fertility Institute. Eventually, Nina gives birth to a healthy, beautiful baby boy, but before she can even name him he is kidnapped from the nursery.
Helpless and alone, faced with an indifferent police bureaucracy, Nina becomes convinced that to find her baby she must discover the identity of the sperm donor. When she returns to the Institute, it has closed down. Desperate, she finds herself on the track of the wealthy family who funded it, in a world totally foreign to her, the Bahamas. There she meets the great diver, the maverick Matthias, a man unlike any she has known, with his own reasons for dredging this mystery from the deep.
A story of two people from different worlds, working towards different ends, who together turn up a world of horrors in the deep, resonating in the wartime mysteries of Nazi survivors, a fatal dive that has ruined Matthias, and a strange world of Bahamian aristocrats whose stunning past can still compel the future. Coming together as strangers—believing romance to be history—they will find themselves in a profoundly satisfying and grown-up love affair.
“A good thriller needs style, atmosphere and a surprising plot,” said The New York Times Book Review of Abraham’s last book, “and Hard Rain... has all of these and something extra: depth of feeling.” Powerfully novelistic, plotted with riveting suspense, Abraham’s new thriller has thrust his work up a whole new notch in craft, providing us with the ultimate story of jeopardy.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Thriller, Suspense, Crime, Mystery Thriller, American

389 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Peter Abrahams is an American author of crime fiction for both adults and children.
His book Lights Out (1994) was nominated for an Edgar Award for best novel. Reality Check won the best young adult Edgar Award in 2011. Down the Rabbit Hole, first in the Echo Falls series, won the best children's/young adult Agatha Award in 2005. The Fan was adapted into a film starring Robert De Niro and directed by Tony Scott (1996).
His literary influences are Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, and Ross Macdonald. Stephen King has referred to him as "my favorite American suspense novelist".
Born in Boston, Abrahams lives in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. He is married and has four children including Rosie Gray. He graduated from Williams College in 1968.

Peter Abrahams is also writing under the pseudonym Spencer Quinn (Chet and Bernie Mysteries).

Reviews

[Debra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephen King recommended author and book. He says: “Peter Abrahams is my favorite American suspense novelist.”

In his book On Writing, published 2000, King says on pages 285-286: "These are the best books I've read over the last three or four years, the period during which I wrote The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Pop-up Book, Hearts in Atlantis, On Writing, and the as-yet-unpublished From a Buick 8. In some way or other, I suspect each book in the list had an influence on the books I wrote."

He continues to say "...a good many of these might show you some new ways of doing your work. Even if they don't, they're apt to entertain you. They certainly entertained me."


Please click here to check out my group:
Books Stephen King Recommends

1/5/13. This is my first book by this author, and I was definitely not disappointed. What a thrill-ride! I will be reading more of Abrahams books. Now I know why King recommended him!

[Mark Soone · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first encounter with Abrahams based upon a reccomendation from none other than Stephen King (on the cover, I don't know the man). I discovered during a dry spell, searching out my library and scouring their shelves.

This was a very delightful find for me. The characters were very engaging the plot was very faced paced with lots of action.

[Tab · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book. It does follow something of a standard formula but I never would of thought of putting together sperm banks and secret nazi's. Somehow the author makes it work. I also really liked all main the characters in the story, especially Nina the frantic mother. She's strong but not over the top. Her determination to find her child and the lengths she will go to are the most interesting parts of the story. I enjoy a book where the female lead is not an idiot or weak and Nina is neither of those things.

[Nicky Mason · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was recommended by Stephen King so I thought I'd give it a whirl. I wasn't disappointed, the story was great. Action packed and suspenseful with some added romance in there to boot... and it didn't take anything from the story. Can't beat a bit of tough, sensitive romance. And the protaganists were likeable.

There were some small bits of writing that annoyed me, for example the influx of characters at the beginning then the narative seemed to go a little slow and simple and some bits were similar to his last book I read. But overall I enjoyed reading it and found myself glued to the last chapters wanting to reach the resolution.

[Joshua Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I got to the end, I appreciated (and liked) the premise, but poor plotting-normally a strength for Abrahams-made this a frustrating read at times. 2.5/5

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I keep debating… Four… Five… Four… I guess I really want to rank this novel as a 4 1/2. So I'll give it a five.
This is a book that will grip you and keep you going from paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter. Always on the edge and breathless to know what happens next. Not very many books do that to me anymore. This is the first "dive" into Peter Abrams books.

I really appreciate the way that Peter Abrams writes. Even though his other books written under the name of Spencer Quinn, are so very different in theme, there is that quality that makes you want to read more of his works. One thing I like particularly like is his punctuation of a paragraph with a short sentence that brings home the feeling of the words you've just read.
There is, though, an entire paragraph describing some horrors of the Holocaust that sounds too clinical to be coming from an old Jewish lady.
I do wish, though, that he slip some levity in here and there. This is just me. The first author I ever followed religiously was Stephen King. And I think that's what I appreciated most about his novels. The way he could give you a smile or maybe even a giggle when you're holding your breath and then take you into the depths.
Also love the ending.
When I found out that Spencer Quinn, my very favorite author of dog tales, also wrote under Peter Abrams I was overjoyed.
of course I realized that these two genres couldn't be farther apart but that was fine with me. I love a good mystery.
I began Hard Rain first because it seemed the more intriguing of the two books. I got in about 50 pages and after an excellent beginning it just seem to get 'ugly'. So I picked up this book and was pleasantly surprised. Loved this one all the way through. With renewed optimism I gave Hard Rain another try. Well, my renewed optimism soon vanished. When he introduces the women they are rich, bitchy sluts. Don't care for that much but I could've overlooked it if it had just not continued on such a downhill turn. Oh well, Think I'll just wait for some more Spencer Quinn.

[Flo · Rating 5 out of 5]

August 2023

Even better 2nd time read! I couldn't stop reading because I didn't remember anything whatsoever from my first reading of this book 7 years ago. Like reading a totally new book. This touches on the weird philosophy of German eugenicists during and after WWII. Recommend it highly.

August 2016

his is the 2nd book by Peter Abrahams that I have read and I thoroughly enjoyed both of them. This is a classic mystery thriller involving Matthias, owner of Zombie Bay, a bar and motel located on one of the islands of the Caribbean. The Zombie Bay caters to divers and Matthias is being sued for millions for the negligent handling of the airtanks by his staff of one of his guest divers who apparently is in a permanent coma. Needless to say, Matthias will lose the Zombie Bay, his livelihood and his home. Then there is Nina Kitchener, a soon to be 40 year old single woman with no love life in sight living the good life in New York, running her publishing business, making a lot of money who suddenly feels her biological clock ticking. This is a wonderful thriller, the I-couldn't-stop-reading kind. Intelligent, well written, lots of fun and I really could not stop reading. Peter Abrahams has written quite a few of these and I aim to read them all. Good stuff.

[Jim Thomsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Matthias could no longer picture the face of Stepdaddy Number Two, but he retained a sparkling image of that two-tone Coupe de Ville, its red-and-white bodywork polished by Stepdaddy Number Two until it glowed. One Sunday morning an errant baseball went through its windshield while it was parked in the yard; the sound had gotten Stepdaddy Number Two out of bed and running outside in his undershorts, whirling his belt in the air. Matthias’s legs had frozen at the sight. He hadn’t been able to run a step. Number Two had given him the kind of beating that was known in their neighborhood as “a good whipping.” Matthias could picture the belt as vividly as the Coupe de Ville—snakeskin with a silver buckle. Once he’d woken in the night and seen his mother wearing it and nothing else."

Just give that passage a little bit of thought. Think of how much that passage tells you about a character while telling nothing, only showing. Authors of lesser talent would tell you that Matthias feared and hated his stepfather, or that he resented his mother for not sticking up for him. They would tell you these things and move on, having nominally covered a Sympathetic Backstory base. And in doing so, they would deny you your greatest pleasure as a reader: getting to look on throw the windowpanes of the pages and work out what's going on for yourself. You would be denied the right to let your synapses fire on the way to earned discovery, and as a result, you will be held at a polite and well-intentioned remove from the text and engage with it at the deepest possible level. As a result, you're just an accessory to the story, a bystander, an extra. You're nit a partner.

The books of Peter Abrahams make you a partner. He does so by approaching you with the greatest respect, by not presuming to deny you your greatest prerogative as a reader. That is his particular genius — knowing just how much to give you in order to know what's going on while giving you all the room in the world to decide what it means, who wants what, who's willing to do what to get what, whose moral compass is in good working order, and who doesn't have one to begin with, without ever withholding too much or making textual engagement so challenging that it begins to feel like something you have to punch a clock and pull on work gloves to participate in.

Reading Peter Abrahams for me is feeling the pleasant prickles of a brain massage. He's giving me something to enjoy, but it's up to me to decide how I enjoy it and what it feels like. It's a lot comfortable and a little painful, but in that way that makes you want more of it if you're capable of admitting it to yourself because you like the feeling of being alive in the midst of pleasure, not just checked out. Plain and simple, he's just got the touch.

PRESSURE DROP, published in 1989, was one of a mini-canon of Abrahams novels that I call his "For Some, The War Never Ended" series, even though beyond that loose theme, they share nothing else in common beyond the master's uncommon touch. Previous novels in this "series" touched on the legacy of World War II in North Africa, on the complicated aftermath of the struggle that gave birth to the modern state of Israel, of ongoing score-settlings from the births of Communist China and the Vietnam War. All have in common vain old men and their deranged acolytes and descendants , all determined to avenge decades-old losses and feeling justified, in the spinning centrifuges of their peculiar moral compasses, in killing and kidnapping in the name of some eugenic or ethnic ideal.

PRESSURE DROP is chiefly the story of N.M. Matthias, ex Bay of Pigs-era Navy frogman turned proprietor of a down-and-almost out diving resort in the Bahamas; and Nina Kitchener, hard-charging Manhattan public-relations executive who decides, abruptly, on the cusp of forty, to have a baby even though there's no man in her life. More I will not say because I would not want to deny you the pleasures of figuring out how their worlds could possibly intersect, but suffice to say, they do, amid a trail of casual cruelties and baroque horrors.

It's not a perfect novel — Abrahams, like most authors in the crime genre, struggles with stick-the-landing endings, often opting for climactic scenes of restored order that seem too suspiciously timed and too tidily stage-managed; I got the feeling in the last few chapters that Abrahams lost interest in his story to some degree and needed to wrap it up with unsatisfying swiftness and silly, snarling-villain speechifying. But a novel that's just 90% great is still great — much greater than stories that don't know how much to tell or to show.

It may be bad form to cite a review in a review, But Joyce Carol Oates' 2005 review of another Abrahams novel in The New Yorker has helped me to understand the elusive and elliptical pleasure-properties of an Abrahams novel:

— "Although Abrahams’s novels are genre-affiliated, they differ considerably from one another in tone, texture, ambition, and accomplishment. Often the prose is coolly deployed as a camera, gliding over the surfaces of things, pausing to expose vanity, foolishness, pathos."

— "Unlike most suspense fiction, which operates on the practical principle that swift, cinematic scenes will keep readers turning pages without lingering to wonder about verisimilitude, originality, or, indeed, literary worth, Abrahams’s novels are gratifyingly attentive to psychological detail, richly atmospheric, layered in ambiguity."

— "Peter Abrahams’s strongest novels seem to suggest, despite their allegiance to genre, a fascination with something beyond mere form."

Give PRESSURE DROP — or any Peter Abrahams novel — a try. The experience of it may seem a little foreign and unsettling to you at first, given the refusal to traffic in simple, straightforward declaratives. But, should you persist through a period of the cerebral bends (PRESSURE DROP is rich in authoritative diving scenes), you'll discover the finest reading pleasure there is: the pleasure of being shown, rather than told, a great story in a great style, and the pleasure of being invited inside the covers to show something of yourself at the same time.

[Sharyn Hutchens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Guy suspense and baby kidnapping

Guy-adventure blended with modern-single-mom angst, which rolls into white knuckle suspense. I had my doubts about this book when we moved to Zombie Bay in the tropics, complete with a foul-mouthed parrot, fast boats, and macho men skin diving. But just in time we went back to New York and the kidnapped baby mystery and I stuck it out. The last third of the book made me really glad I did. Recommend highly for anyone who likes suspense and an underplayed love story.

[Baba Looey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good book. Perfect to read on a plane trip - I did not want to put it down. The story was paced well and characterization was perfect. Sometimes endings feel forced, but not here.

[Graeme Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brief respite for me from philosophy and history. Masterclass in the mystery/crime genre. Great holiday read.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel has several seemingly unconnected plots that you know must intertwine at some point but don't see how. A single woman has a baby after using artificial insemination. The baby is born healthy but is kidnapped from the hospital. The mother meets another woman who had a similar experience. She tries to find the name of the sperm donor but suddenly the clinic is closed and no one knows anything about it. In the Bahamas, a man is about to lose his diving business after being sued for the death of a diving client. The man and woman meet up and find that there difficulties are connected and go back to Nazi wartime survivors. I enjoyed this novel and will read more from this author.

[Shirley Hartman-Rozee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, but could not see where it was going—how the story of the woman having her baby kidnapped tied in with the guy being sued for over a million dollars. There were sections so intense: one was the birth of the baby and the other was the hair raising account of Matthias diving in the blue pool. I actually got claustrophobic just reading about his descent and then not being able to find his way back. Peter Abrahams is a very good writer, lovely descriptive passages and sensible, easy-to-read style. I’d recommend this book to anyone who likes mystery, suspense, and a heartwarming ending.

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Exciting but way too implausible

Pressure Drop is a book with unique plot and I give the author points for creativity. But I must subtract points (and rating stars) for the extremely implausible ways the author enables the main characters to escape from or survive the numerous life threatening events in the book. Many are too implausible! This was a real distraction for me as I read the book. Too many “miracles” make for a poor adventure novel.

[Diane Secchiaroli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting mystery. Couldn't figure out how the two story lines would merge but they did in a seamless way. Liked the book the more I got into it. Would recommend it to my bookclub.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was on a list of 'Stephen King Recommends' so I picked it up. It was tedious at times. Not a hard read, I just felt that the pieces fell too neatly together at the end.

[Salahuddin Hourani]

ملاحظة لي: لم اقرا الكتاب بعد

مقترح من ستيفين كينغ

[S]

sk booklist

[Carmen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another kidnapped child. Abrahams seems obsessed with this theme. Some sperm bank/fertility institutes are set up solely to provide a heir for a guy in a coma by his rich, crazy family.

[Ellen Stenzler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peter Abrahams always does a masterful job of making sure all the pieces of his story fit together seamlessly. Enjoyable read!

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good story.