cover image Hell's Aquarium

Hell's Aquarium

Steve Alten. Variance Publishing LLC, $27.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-935142-04-1

Bestseller Alten's fourth Meg thriller recycles plot lines from earlier books in the series based on the premise that the fearsome prehistoric shark, Carcharodon megalodon, survives in the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench. Jonas Taylor, who discovered the giant shark in 1997's Meg, is still running the Tanaka Institute in Monterey, Calif., a research facility that generates income from exhibiting Angel, a full-grown, 74-foot long megalodon, in a manmade lagoon. The birth of five female pups to Angel complicates the task of maintaining the huge creature. When ""the Donald Trump of Dubai"" offers to purchase two of the baby megs to stock a new aquarium in his country, Jonas's college-age son, David, accepts a large fee to go to Dubai to help the two beasts get used to their new habitat. David winds up having numerous close encounters with death in setups that will be fresh only to those who haven't read the three previous Meg books.