Every time I read a book by Will Dean, I promise myself I will never read another one again but lo behold I pick the latest one! I can't help myself . The books draw you in but then the ending always makes you want to scream and call up Mr. Dean and ask what happened? I guess if a book makes you do that then it is a great book!

Having lost my reading mojo, I was picking up books and putting them down again and just couldn't settle to read anything. Until I got approved to read this.

I have been a Will Dean fan since he started writing and this book was just superb. The amount of research for a start off that must have gone in to writing this book is to be admired.

As for the book itself, just fantastic. It was tense, it was claustrophobic and everything else you could ask for.

Highly recommended.

This book ate my whole Saturday. I literally couldn't put it down. Yes, there is a lot of info dump that people will either enjoy or be allergic to but I found it all really interesting and once the story gets moving it's incredibly tense. If I was reading it in print rather than on kindle I'd have been struggling not to flip to the end to relieve the tension of not knowing what was going to happen. The characters are a great mix, all different but believable and with their own stories. The MC, Ellen, is brilliantly drawn. And the plot is riveting, particularly the claustrophobia of the last quarter. Even the ending - you think you know what happened, but do you? Excellent.

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Chamber to consider for review.

'Never get ahead of your hat'.

The first thing to say is that Will Dean's new thriller The Chamber deserves a title for 'most high pressure novel of the year'. Literally, because the events of the story take place in a diving capsule that's been pressurised to deep sea conditions. Our protagonists are therefore breathing 'helox', a mixture of helium and oxygen, and, as main character Ellen points out, they all speak with squeaky voices which have to be decoded electronically for those outside.

An amusing thought, or it would be, if the events that befall Ellen and her five companions weren't so grim.

The Chamber does a fine job, I think, of portraying the strenuous conditions under which the divers survive. They're meant to be in the pressurised chamber for a month, attending to repairs on North Sea oil equipment on daily shifts without the need for further compression and decompression. Saturation diving like this - 'Sat' - isn't for the fainthearted, it's only for the best of the best. Everyone in the chamber has proved their ability through years of hard work and rigorous (and expensive) training. Ellen is one of the few women working at the top - or perhaps I should say at the bottom - of this industry and the role has cost her, as we find out. As it's cost her companions. They are all risking health effects from the saturation conditions and from the accidents caused by the stress on the equipment (there are constant references to rust). The month away from home wrecks family and home life for men and women, though Ellen is subject to judgments which aren't made of her male colleagues. She is seen as sacrificing her family life, they aren't.

There are also the peculiar economic conditions of the job - everyone is a self-employed contractor - which breed grudges and quarrels in what is a small world of jobs and workers. The nature of the job, providing, as it does, basic accommodation and meals - 'three hots and a cot' - encourages institutionalisation (there are comparisons both with the Armed Forces and with prisons) encouraging the divers back out, away from the perplexities and decisions of ordinary life.

So when things begin to go wrong, with Ellen and her mates imprisoned until a 5-day descompression can be undertaken, the fingers of blame point in all direction.

This is an incredibly tense book. Literally a locked-room mystery, the divers are thrown on their own resources both to investigate what's happening and to protect themselves from further harm. The conditions they're in tend to paranoia even when things are going well, with phantasms and imagination a risk of long, lonely hours and isolation. But in a macho world - even for women! - certain subjects are avoided, or at least, kept to be discussed on shore. With its lapses in the narration, its room for interpretation about what is going on outside the chamber and its sense there are things we're not being told, the story develops an almost eerie mood which Dean contributes to by dropping references to the Scottish Play through the narrative, fitting given the location of the North East coast of Scotland (one of the main characters, it soon emerges, lives in Cawdor). See how many you can get - there is a Malcolm here, I also spotted Dunsinane, a MacDuff, numerous quotes and of course, in the chamber infection control is key so there's plenty of hand washing...

That play, I'd remind you, deals not only with a power struggle but with temptation, with an outside direction to do evil. It's a direction that one may or may not resists. There may be a connection in The Chamber: what is going on outside, and what evils, what temptations, have our characters brought in form there?

The story gets even more tense as we near the, and this one kept me up past bedtime as I had to finish it. A superb piece of writing that I'd recommend strongly.

I loved Will Dean's books such as Last thing to burn, firstborn and the Last Passenger and so I was hoping this new one, The Chamber , wouldn't disappoint - and it didn't.
Set in the world of deep sea diving, I found myself wondering if Will had actual experienced this career himself as all the terminology and background information made me feel like I was hearing from a professional deep sea diver and the anecdotes from various members of the team about their experiences all over the world, including real life evens such as Piper Alpha made it all the more real.
Ellen is the narrator and you can tell she is a troubled character from the start, but everyone in the team has got different reasons for doing this job when they are sent to the sea bed for weeks at a time to work on the oil pipelines, breathing a mix of helium and oxygen so their bloodstream is full of it. And this is the key here - because in order to return to the surface they must undergo slow decompression - so they don't get the bends which could be fatal. They must wait in th chamber until the mixture of gases in the air is slowly returned to normal and their bloodstream is filled with oxygen - a process that takes days.
Ellen returns from the first shift on the seabed to find one of the 6 members of the team dying. The team are all trauma medic trained and they have to attempt life saving CPR within a metal tin no bigger than a family size bathroom deep in the North Sea, watched and supervised by a medic on board the ship that holds them steady. He dies despite their efforts and they need to return to the surface. But this is where the locked room countdown begins. Can they make it to the surface undergoing decompression before any of the others are killed. The answer is no - but who will die, who is doing this and are they being sabotaged by people from the outside - those who give them their food and water, or worse -----from within.
In the last few chapters Will Dean really ramps up the tension, the constant countdown, the paranoia, the fear and most of all wondering who is doing this and why!

Will Dean is one of the few authors that make me so tense I end up gritting my teeth the whole time I’m reading. This is very different to The Last Thing to Burn but evoked the same feelings of dread. I absolutely loved it!

It was fascinating learning about saturation diving which I’d never heard of and would never, ever want to do. It was claustrophobic and gripping and completely captivating.

Brilliantly done!

Ellen Brooke is a satuation diver and is posted on a job with 5 other guys, men she's worked with before and trusts, after all she's stuck in a hyperbaric chamber for a whole month with them, only leaving to work on the sea bed in the North sea. On the first morning she spends 8 hours on her dive but on her return to the chamber her fellow colleagues are trying to resuscitate a newbie, Tea-bag. Sadly, with no success. They are told they will be brought back to the surface but have to face 4 days further whilst chamber is decompressed. Tensions are running high and the claustrophobic atmosphere does not help the situation.
Having not enjoyed Will Dean's last book so much I was debating about reading this novel. I am so glad I did, I could not put the book down, I was completely engrossed in the story. Sure to be another successful book and I think it would make a great movie

And now for something completely different – a murder mystery in a diving bell. The author must have made an enormous amount of research and it pays off. There are twists and turns to keep you guessing as well as red herrings (rather appropriate being underwater). Overall, an easy read once you've mastered the divers' terminology and slang.

I will probably be very unpopular with this review as I didn’t enjoy this book as much as the authors previous books.

The premise sounded great, six sat divers in a confined space for long periods. The descriptions of their life on board initially were interesting however I felt they soon became repetitive. I enjoyed learning about this type of diving initially but the book just became more words to read.

As the book progressed I hoped we would have one of Mr Dean’s flawless endings that have previously wowed me but we didn’t. In fact the ending left me with so many questions that I’m not sure what actually happened.

I won’t give up on this author as I know he has written some of my favourite ever books.

I absolutely love Will Dean. I’m pretty sure he could write an instruction manual and I’d buy it, so this probably isn’t the most unbiased of reviews but this really is a brilliantly terrifying read.
6 saturation divers who know each other well (except the newest crew member) are in a hyperbaric chamber, being lowered off the shore near Aberdeen to do some maintenance. Our narrator is the only woman on board; a rare event. Ellen is documenting her experiences to try to encourage other female divers.
They are supposed to be away for a month, but on the first day of work, one of the crew members dies, and they need to be slowly raised to the surface to prevent the bends. Then another crew member dies…and suddenly it feels like there might be a threat from within, or from without, from things passed through the food hatch. What is going on? Who can the remaining members trust?

This is a very claustrophobic read. Will Dean’s last book, The Last Passenger has put me off cruise ships for life and now I’ve also ruled out a career change to becoming a saturation diver. He’s got a real knack for the gasp out loud moment too- I did not see this one coming. Right until the last page it’s hard to know what is going on. The fear conjured up about being trapped in a tiny chamber, at the mercy of someone else for days on end is palpable. I picked this up yesterday and didn’t put it down, which is surely the mark of an excellent thriller. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Set deep beneath the surface of the North Sea this a locked room thriller that quite literally takes your breath away as one by one the deep sea divers succumb to something, but what ! What or who is picking them off and why ahhhhh well you have to read the book to figure that one out !
This was such a claustrophobic read and full of atmosphere it really had me guessing till the very end it was full of interesting facts and descriptions about sat divers and working on the ocean floor a subject I knew nothing about, Will Dean had obviously done a lot of research and this really came over well in the writing.
I liked the characters and the stories they had to tell, the setting was spot on for a locked room novel and really did enjoy the read.
So another fabulous standalone read from Mr Dean and one I can highly recommend, many, many thanks Mr D.
My thanks also to NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for giving me the opportunity to read the ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

Thank you to Netgalley for allowing me to read this book in return for an honest review. I am a big fan of Will Dean’s and I was excited to read his new book. I have to admit that I think this is now my favourite book by the author. This book is full of mystery, suspense and atmosphere. A truly compelling read that left me feeling completely claustrophobic and my nerves shattered. I literally felt as though I was in that chamber at many points and I was on the edge of my seat the whole way through. I absolutely recommend this book to all. An easy 5 stars from me.

When I hear the words 'locked room thriller' you already have my attention.
This is an author that I have had mixed results with. Some of his books have been 5 star reads for me and some I really haven't enjoyed, so I was interested to see where this one would land and I had high hopes going in to this.
OUTLIER ALERT!
This was a big miss for me.
It was atmospheric but I never once found it thrilling or even that tense. I was never once gripped by the plot and I actually found it VERY dull throughout.
I did like the characters and how they interacted with each other but that was the only thing I did like.
It also seemed to me to be so repetitive. I lost count of the amount of times we are told that they have to keep things clean. WE GET IT.
The ending was a big fail too. I was left with an overwhelming feeling of 'is that it?' The whole thing felt totally pointless and there wasn't actually much plot.
This was a very disappointing read for me and I'm not sure I will read from this author again, I just don't seem to gel with his writing style.

I'm getting used to Will Dean filling my head with bizarre dreams at night. He has a way of writing that creeps into your mind and sits there, taunting you all day until you open the book again. The detail in this story is meticulous. Having heard Will speak on how he plans his novels, I'm sure he spent considerable time researching saturation diving before he went into his own isolation to write the first draft.

I knew very little about saturation diving before reading this. Thanks to all that detail, I know quite a bit more now. I could easily imagine the space in the chamber, although I think for my own sanity, I made it a bit bigger in my head. It is, quite literally, a claustrophobic read. It has similarities with The Last Passenger in that things are going majorly wrong and no one knows why. Most importantly, no one knows who to trust. At least on a cruise ship the characters had space to get away from one another. Not so in The Chamber.

Will Dean has paced the story well, especially with time slowly ticking down as the chamber is depressurised and, although freedom beckons, madness descends among the crew. It's a classic Will Dean ending where you find you still have questions that will never be answered. I suppose the real question is what will the next book be about? I'm predicting caving.

I love Will Dean’s novels and how they twist and turn so much you are never quite sure what to think. The Chamber is a fascinating world of deep sea diving which is all going well until one of the crew drops down dead. I really enjoyed the story and trying to guess who was the murderer!

This was a tense, nail-biting read which combined two of my worst nightmares: the thought of being underwater and confined spaces!
Ellen Brooke is about to spend four weeks on the sea bed with five other divers, most of whom she knows and trusts - a necessity because the smallest error could lead to death. Just after starting work, the newest recruit is found dead in his bunk and they are ordered to return to dry land. They face four days of decompression before reaching the surface. When a second member of the crew also dies, panic takes hold. This novel was atmospheric, compelling and threatening with an unsettling end which left me feeling the need to look over my shoulder. A great read.

I was delighted to be approved by NetGalley to read The Chamber by Will Dean. Since reading The Last Thing To Burn, I had been looking out for his next psychological thriller.

The novel is about a team of saturation divers locked in a decompression chamber. I found the first third of the novel a little boring and full of jargon, but glad that I continued to read on.
When one of the divers dies suddenly and suspiciously, the secrets start to come out. Tension galore makes this a real page-turner as one-by-one they meet their death.

As a thriller, it has heart-stopping moments and an edge-of-your-seat vibe. Overall, I preferred The Last Thing To Burn, as The Chamber had that awful 'double-twist' ending which I had already predicted yet hoped I wouldn't get.

Entertainment factor, though, I would highly recommend.

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.

I first came to Will Dean in 2022 with First Born. I then read The Last Thing to Burn, followed by The Last Passenger, and was thrilled to get a copy of his newest book. Every now and again you find an author who was missing from your life and for me, Will Dean is that author. Whenever I read a book of his, I think it can't possibly top the previous one, and yet it always does.

There is no hanging about in this book. Within 2-3% of the book we know our main players, the setting, the task. We get to know more about it as the story goes on, at the same time sometimes as the characters, which was exciting.

I know next to nothing about decompression chambers and whatnot, outside of what I've read in fictional books, but it all sounds so right that I'm assuming Will is either a secret deep-sea diver or his research is top notch.

Will is an expert at creating a sense of setting, weather, clothing, appearance. It's full of detail but none of it seems extraneous or surplus. We can imagine each person very clearly in our heads, which makes it easier to become invested in the story. We can hear the birds calling above, smell the salty water, feel the pressure forcing down on you. And yet it never feels unreal. It's all so frighteningly familiar, and yet distant.

I made the mistake of googling what would happen if the hatch was opened and the pressure changed, resulting in, most likely, immediate death. I advise you not to google it, or at least don't google in images. That's something no-one needs to see, but it did give me more of a sense of the importance of the job when reading it.

This one was slightly more niche than his other works. His previous books, whilst unlikely, contain scenes and situations that anyone could find themselves in. But this one is very specific to a few individuals which I found interesting, as I couldn't immediately put myself in their shoes, which made for a different reading experience.

For a book set in one very small setting, it was full of twists and turns and secrets. The enclosed settings adds to the claustrophobic feeling the reader gets; it's a very clever, and probably not easy, way of writing. For me, the thrill comes from this environment, from the claustrophobia, from the characters, rather than the plot. We start to question things like the characters do: who can we trust? Can we trust our colleagues, the outside crew, or even ourselves?

It is thrilling, fast-paced but not rushed, entertaining, frightening, tense, mad, emotional, heart-stopping, sad; it's just absolutely everything and more.

A thriller set in the world of saturation diving, where a group of divers are locked inside a decompressed chamber. When one of the divers is found dead, the others can’t simply leave the chamber, they’ll have to wait days for decompression to be completed before they can leave and tensions are running high…..

I have read everything Will Dean has read since The Last Thing to Burn. He is a master at putting together a tense situation on the age which leaves the reader feeling the same.

The premise of this novel was really interesting and not something I’d heard a lot about. It did put me in mind of the tv show Vigil which is set on a submarine. There was a similar sort of dread bubbling where the characters start to realise that they may be trapped with a killer amongst them.

I would say that this probably didn’t quite live up to my expectations but that’s perhaps because the authors last couple of books have just been THAT good. This is still a great thriller with a new premise that was gripping.

I’d recommend to fans of the author and if thrillers generally.