Rating: 
Summary: A melodramatic thriller that has "Hollywood" written on it
Review: "[Whitney Burke] thought how life is sometimes like a cave, a tortured, convoluted succession of byways that takes you down into darker places than can ever be imagined; a nether region where you are forced to search the shadows to find out what you hold real and true; a series of difficult passages to be negotiated with a faith in something greater than yourself so you might once again emerge into sunlight."
--from page 350. Twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, Mark T. Sullivan is the author of the critically acclaimed Ghost Dance, Hard News, The Fall Line, and The Purification Ceremony. His latest work of fiction, Labyrinth, featuring nonstop action and derring-do adventure, has "Hollywood" written all over it.
Ranging from the Descartes Highlands of the moon (in 1972) to a physics lab at the Univ. of Tennessee (in 2004) to the Labyrinth cave system of Eastern Kentucky (in 2007), this gripping and suspenseful novel, technically a sci-fi yarn, is basically a story of human endurance and survival in the bowels of the earth. At the center of the story is moon rock 66095, which has the astonishing power of transmuting existing elements and creating new ones, and of releasing tremendous energy deemed essential to the economic and political well-being of the United States. Federal troops are ordered into Eastern Kentucky to find the moon rock, which has been hidden in Labyrinth cave by Robert Gregor, a brilliant but psychotic physicist who, serving a life sentence in Kentucky's State Penitentiary at Eddyville, escapes and heads for the cave, along with several other hardened criminals.
Converging within the claustrophobic confines of the Labyrinth are the predators and the prey, including expert spelunker Tom Burke and his 14-year-old daughter, Alexandra "Cricket" Burke. Whitney Burke, Tom's wife and Cricket's mother, vows never to return to a cave after one of her friends was drowned in a previous cave expedition. She must overcome her post-traumatic stress disorder, however, when she learns that Tom and Cricket are being held hostage inside the cave by escaped felons. Ironically, the strength of Labyrinth may also be its weakness. Reading this novel, one cannot help comparing it to the cliffhanger serials shown many years ago at Saturday matinees. Mark T. Sullivan pulls out all the stops. Virtually every chapter ends with an "impossible" scenario. Surely the "good guy(s)" cannot possibly survive this time! Reading a constant bombardment of such cliffhangers, we plead for a breather; otherwise we shall hyperventilate. So much overkill causes crisis fatigue. Although the novel's melodrama might play well on the silver screen, the book becomes almost comical. Sullivan has tried too hard to produce a blockbuster. Nevertheless, Labyrinth has a redeeming feature. Cricket Burke's development from dependency to self-reliance is a remarkable rite of passage--a convincing coming-of-age story. This much of the story rings true.
Rating:
Summary: A Non-Stop Thriller With Emotional Impact
Review: A rock with unique properties is found on the moon. World renowned cave explorer, Tom Burke, and his daughter Cricket, begin the subterranean expedition of a lifetime. And a group of maximum security prisoners escapes incarceration. When this volatile mix of circumstances collides, the father and daughter are forced to lead the deranged convicts on a harrowing journey into the bowels of the earth. On the surface, Whitney Burke, wife and mother of the kidnapped pair, is left no choice but to face her worst fear. As the only available person qualified to navigate the monstrous cave system known as the Labyrinth, she must lead a team of U.S. marshals into the cave in an attempt to save her family. Little does she know that the government considers her life and the lives of her family as secondary in importance to retrieving the lost moon stone which they believe is hidden in the cave. Shattered by nightmares of a caving accident that took the life of a friend, Whitney struggles for strength, and then re-enters the dark pit where she swore she would never again set foot. Tom and Cricket suffer abuse at the hands of the convicts but are determined to wear their captors down in the unforgivable environment of the cave. Tom is puzzled by what might be a hidden agenda held by the prison guard who assisted in the escape and kidnapping. But before he can make any sense of it he finds himself separated from Cricket. He realizes that it will take all of his skill and knowledge of the cave to reunite with his daughter before time runs out. Meanwhile, Cricket is alone with a psychopathic killer with a history of strangling his victims with his bare hands. And Whitney, with her dwindling escort of U.S. marshals is forced deeper and deeper into the cave, even as the waters from a hundred year storm rise to unprecedented levels and threaten to trap them all.
Rating: 
Summary: Sort of fun, implausible, badly written
Review: During the Apollo missions a special rock was brought back. No one knew it was special. Not until a disturbed genius gets a hold of it via fraud. The rock can superconduct at room temperature (currently we can only do this at about -250 F). When his superior points out that the discovery will be credited to the boss, the scientist kills him. Now we have a "worlds most famous cave explorer" leading a NASA mission to train on mining on the Moon. The training ground will be Labyrinth cave, a mammoth cave discovered by the explorer in 2000. But then the scientist escapes prison and heads for the same cave system. Seems he used to play in it as a boy and he hid the moon rock there before he was caught. NASA does not know their missing rock is in the cave. Just as the NASA mission starts, the escaped convicts arrive and take over. They need the explorer to guide them to the cave areas the scientist knows. To ensure cooperation, they have his 14-year-old daughter as hostage (yeah, NASA let her come along). The race is on. There is the race for the rock, the race for the rescue and the race against a storm that is coming and could cause flooding in the cave. To make matters worse, when lightning strikes, the rock amplifies it and causes an earthquake. Apparently during the years the rock was hidden, no lightning ever struck the mountains. Right! The ending is typical of the genre, no matter how prepared at the start, all weapons are gone at the end and there is a fist fight. Even the "surprise" ending was no surprise. Examples of the bad writing:
When faced with the criminals, Tom the explorer does this. "Tom blanched. He understood that he was facing not men but animals. That understanding triggered the survivor instinct in him, an instinct honed over years spent navigating the bowels of the Earth. He felt himself turn to iron inside. He looked around at them all. "You sick bastards. I promise you, you'll pay--" at which point one of the bad guys backhands him to the ground. Boy, that kind of survivor instinct could cause you to walk into traffic.
At a later point as one of the bad guys is bathed in the brilliance of the stone, it is remarked that his skin turned opaque and that you could see the shadows of bones and webs of veins. Not by any definition of opaque. That means you CAN'T see through something. Labyrinth cave is located near Mammoth cave, although separate. The author seems unaware of Mammoth cave's true expanse (it was discovered that it was actually joined to other systems and thus much larger than originally thought). Some of the Labyrinth cave galleries have the same names as those in Mammoth cave. The rescue team seems to go through completely different terrain from their quarry even when following footprints. Bad. The reader is left with 400 pages of mediocre to bad writing, a pointless plot without proper repercussions, no real drama, just a bunch of scenes strung together with descriptions of rock formations.
Rating:
Summary: Sort of fun, implausible, badly written
Review: During the Apollo missions a special rock was brought back. No one knew it was special. Not until a disturbed genius gets a hold of it via fraud. The rock can superconduct at room temperature (currently we can only do this at about -250 F). When his superior points out that the discovery will be credited to the boss, the scientist kills him. Now we have a "worlds most famous cave explorer" leading a NASA mission to train on mining on the Moon. The training ground will be Labyrinth cave, a mammoth cave discovered by the explorer in 2000. But then the scientist escapes prison and heads for the same cave system. Seems he used to play in it as a boy and he hid the moon rock there before he was caught. NASA does not know their missing rock is in the cave. Just as the NASA mission starts, the escaped convicts arrive and take over. They need the explorer to guide them to the cave areas the scientist knows. To ensure cooperation, they have his 14-year-old daughter as hostage (yeah, NASA let her come along). The race is on. There is the race for the rock, the race for the rescue and the race against a storm that is coming and could cause flooding in the cave. To make matters worse, when lightning strikes, the rock amplifies it and causes an earthquake. Apparently during the years the rock was hidden, no lightning ever struck the mountains. Right! The ending is typical of the genre, no matter how prepared at the start, all weapons are gone at the end and there is a fist fight. Even the "surprise" ending was no surprise. Examples of the bad writing:
When faced with the criminals, Tom the explorer does this. "Tom blanched. He understood that he was facing not men but animals. That understanding triggered the survivor instinct in him, an instinct honed over years spent navigating the bowels of the Earth. He felt himself turn to iron inside. He looked around at them all. "You sick bastards. I promise you, you'll pay--" at which point one of the bad guys backhands him to the ground. Boy, that kind of survivor instinct could cause you to walk into traffic.
At a later point as one of the bad guys is bathed in the brilliance of the stone, it is remarked that his skin turned opaque and that you could see the shadows of bones and webs of veins. Not by any definition of opaque. That means you CAN'T see through something. Labyrinth cave is located near Mammoth cave, although separate. The author seems unaware of Mammoth cave's true expanse (it was discovered that it was actually joined to other systems and thus much larger than originally thought). Some of the Labyrinth cave galleries have the same names as those in Mammoth cave. The rescue team seems to go through completely different terrain from their quarry even when following footprints. Bad. The reader is left with 400 pages of mediocre to bad writing, a pointless plot without proper repercussions, no real drama, just a bunch of scenes strung together with descriptions of rock formations.
Rating:
Summary: Labyrinth
Review: Everyone wants a moon-rock that a bunch of escaped criminals--really sadistic types--seem to think is sequestered somewhere deep in the Labyrinth Cave system of Kentucky. The escaped criminals--Gregor the twisted scientific genius, Kelly the strangler, Mann the arsonist, and Lyons, prison guard turned criminal (because he knows the value of a moon-rock with transmutative powers when he hears about it)--would like to be the first to be retrieve the rock, so they snatch a father/daughter team of spelunkers and force them down in to the depths. The brave father, Tom Burke, and his feisty 14-year old daughter, call her Cricket for luck, were out caving for the good of science, regretting that they hadn't been able to talk Mrs. Burke into coming along, when the aforementioned thugs showed up with much firepower, demanding underground guides. Lest you think that Mrs. Burke, call her Whitney, does not get roped into things, think again. US Marshals, especially intrepid Marshal Finnerty, need her expertise to reach the coveted moon-rock first...oh, and hopefully save her family. Trouble is, Whitney Burke never wants to set foot in a cave again (this is fracturing the Burke household to no end), mainly due to what happened last time (see tense flashbacks for details). All of this high-concept set-up leads to tunnels galore, perilous climbs, raging underground rivers, less than sturdy natural bridges over vast chasms...plus, don't forget impending floods and some rather unexpected Kentuckian earthquake activity. Despite all hardships, Tom Burke and his daughter learn to work together, as experienced cavers, to try and outwit and wear down the men with guns who prod them on. But Gregor is too smart to fool for long, and Kelly, fresh out of prison, has his lascivious eye on Cricket... This is a fun read, but it doesn't compete with The Descent, by Jeff Long, or an older book called Styx, by Christopher Hyde. The moon-rock stuff gets a bit silly at times, and most of the perils everyone who dares go underground for whatever reason--rescue or riches--are going to be fairly familiar to anyone who delves regularly into this subgenre. But--it's hard to put this one down, just the same, and I think it's because Tom and his daughter are characters you can't help cheering for. I also got caught up in Whitney's desperate attempt to brave the cave to save her family. If the plot hadn't stayed fairly simple, then all the underground scenes of danger and mayhem would have been serving something better.
Rating:
Summary: Almost a good thriller
Review: I liked this book, but it never seemed to maintain the "seat of the pants" action story that I had expected. I read an earlier book by Mr. Sullivan, "The Purification Ceremony" which was quite good. This one just does not maintain the suspense that it could have, and was a bit predictable.
Rating: 
Summary: a caver's thoughts.....
Review: I've been caving in Tennessee for almost 30 years, and I teach at
the University of Tennessee, where the first murder takes place.
Think of a short, 1-page document about how to set up, say, a DVD
player that was written by a Sumerian with minimal knowledge of
English, but who owns a Sumerian-English dictionary. So the
words are all English, but the words often make no sense in the
context. Labyrinth has some of that flavor--you say "Huh? Did I
miss something?" A rock with mysterious powers is brought back from the moon in
1972. In 2004, the villian, Dr Gregor, murders his professor and
steals the rock. In 2007 Gregor and some fellow prisoners escape
from state prison in Kentucky. "Huh?" Apparently Gregor only
partially strangled his professor in Tennessee, popped the prof
into the trunk of his car, drove to Kentucky, and finished
killing him there, hid the rock in a cave in Kentucky, and was
caught 2 weeks later, the body still in the trunk. How do you
tell at that point where the murder actually occurred? Tom Burke, the world's greatest caver--"Huh? There are
rankings? Maybe in 2004 the NSS News will publish annual
rankings?"--and his daughter Cricket are about to start a
through-trip of the world's longest cave--Labyrinth--which he
discovered and mapped 380 miles in 5 years (another very large
"Huh?" here--a 3-man team that surveys half a mile of cave has
had a very good day surveying). The 125-mile long through trip
is so NASA can test the feasibility of mining on the moon--Huh?
crawling through a cave at Earth gravity is the same as walking
in a mine on the moon? No attention is paid to the weather
forecast--Huh? Cavers going into extensive stream passage pay
attention to weather forecasts or are short-lived--I have seen
water shooting out of a 6x6 foot cave entrance (normally dry) as
if from a fire hydrant. Gregor and his gang, rather than go into an entrance close to the
moon rock, go to an entrance some 40 miles away--carrying no
caving gear at all (Huh?) and by coincidence, arrive at the
entrance just as Tom Burke and his crew arrive--so the bad guys
grab cave gear and take Tom and Cricket to help guide them
through the cave to the rock--a trip which will take several
days. We then have scenes of going through the cave. Meanwhile,
Tom's wife Whitney is recruited by the police to guide the in
the cave--she and Tom are the only ones able to find their way
around (Huh? Did Tom and Whitney do all the mapping and set up
the resupply dumps all by themselves?). Problems occur when a huge earthquake collapses various passages
and cave entrances. A gargantuan storm has occurred, causing
flooding, and the lightning has caused the moon rock to trigger
the earthquake (Huh? This is the first thunderstorm in central
Kentucky in 3 1/2 years? Why no earlier earthquakes?). A dam
breaks near the cave causing further flooding and more problems
for those in and out of the cave. Eventually Gregor and the
Burkes (Tom, Whitney,and Cricket) all get to the moon rock.
Soon, the book ends. I still don't see how carefully-planning prison-breakers would
go to a remote cave entrance without cave gear--but I guess that
such things are forgotten amongst the action that follows. There is little in the way of good (4 or 5 stars) cave fiction--
Under Plowman's Floor by Richard Watson is a 5-star novel about
exploring caves in Kentucky--based on Watson's own experiences
in the Mammoth Cave complex--no murders, no moon rocks. Shibumi
by Trevanian--not a cave novel--has some fine caving scenes.
Nevada Barr has a 2 to 3 star mystery centered on a cave in the
Carlsbad area. On the bottom lies Dallas Down, which has the
hero exploring caves in his cavemobile, and who thwarts the
people who are trying to collapse Dallas into the giant cavern
under the city. There is plenty of excellent non-fiction:
Watson & Brucker's The Longest Cave, about the exploration and
connecting of the pieces of the Mammoth Cave system; Subterranean
Climbers by Chevalier is also a classic. Exploring caves can be
enormously exciting--when you squeeze through a tight crawl into
a huge chamber no human has been in previously, for example. You
don't need fiction to make it exciting. Labyrinth would not have
suffered if the cave was not the world's longest cave and if
Burke was not the world's greatest caver--these are overworked
devices, much like thrillers where the president's daughter is
kidnapped--good fiction doesn't need such devices--the daughter
of the vice-mayor of Wartburg does just fine if someone must be
kidnapped in the plot. Sullivan has a lot of the pieces--he
calls cavers cavers and not spelunkers, for example, but there
are too many times when you pause and say "Huh?"
Rating: 
Summary: Strong psychological profiles keep the action fast-paced
Review: If it's gripping fast action you like paired with the terror of a dangerous cave exploration, choose Mark Sullivan's Labyrinth, a riveting story which deserves ongoing recommendation. A professional caving family's survival is put to the test when a madman and a band of escaped felons takes them on a caving journey to uncover a dangerous object. Strong psychological profiles keep the action fast-paced.
Rating:
Summary: Labyrinth
Review: If you've ever wondered what it would be like to descend into a deep, dark cave, then you are in for a treat and a ride into terror as Mark Sullivan gives his readers another block buster of a tale. Labyrinth centers on hard-core cavers, a bunch of escaped convicts, NASA scientists, U. S. marshalls along with Whitney Burke, expert caver who's trying to save her husband and daughter. To cap it off, Whitney's afraid to go into the cave because of a bad experience she suffered the year before involving a close friend. She's racing against the elements, too, as she's foreseen that the area is going to experience a violent thunderstorm that will cause havoc. Whitney will do what she has to to save her loved ones no matter what, and believe me, it is edge of your seat excitement. It keeps you glued to the story like a pit bull not wanting to let go. <Ouch> I hear it is going to be made into a movie by Paramount Studios. I hope this is true because it will be a winner! Somehow, I think we are going to be hearing more about an item that turns up missing, that will be the focus of a book in the future, as well as two interesting characters who will now be adults. This story is too good not to have a sequel. Mark Sullivan is something else as a storyteller. He's a knockout!
He's gotten me into reading suspense again. Don't miss his latest thriller, THE SERPENT'S KISS. Excellent!
Suzanne Coleburn, The Belles & Beaux of Romance
Rating:
Summary: Labyrinth
Review: If you've ever wondered what it would be like to descend into a deep, dark cave, then you are in for a treat and a ride into terror as Mark Sullivan gives his readers another block buster of a tale. Labyrinth centers on hard-core cavers, a bunch of escaped convicts, NASA scientists, U. S. marshalls along with Whitney Burke, expert caver who's trying to save her husband and daughter. To cap it off, Whitney's afraid to go into the cave because of a bad experience she suffered the year before involving a close friend. She's racing against the elements, too, as she's foreseen that the area is going to experience a violent thunderstorm that will cause havoc. Whitney will do what she has to to save her loved ones no matter what, and believe me, it is edge of your seat excitement. It keeps you glued to the story like a pit bull not wanting to let go. <Ouch> I hear it is going to be made into a movie by Paramount Studios. I hope this is true because it will be a winner! Somehow, I think we are going to be hearing more about an item that turns up missing, that will be the focus of a book in the future, as well as two interesting characters who will now be adults. This story is too good not to have a sequel. Mark Sullivan is something else as a storyteller. He's a knockout!
He's gotten me into reading suspense again. Don't miss his latest thriller, THE SERPENT'S KISS. Excellent!
Suzanne Coleburn, The Belles & Beaux of Romance
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