The Chamber

Dean (The Last One) shrewdly reimagines the closed-circle murder mystery in this tense and claustrophobic nail-biter set in an underwater hyperbaric chamber. Ellen Brooke is a rarity: a female saturation diver, trained to plunge up to 1,000 feet underwater and do physical labor under hazardous conditions. She and five male colleagues have been hired by an oil company to conduct maintenance work on an undersea structure at the bottom of the North Sea. For a month, the six will live in a small, pressurized chamber, leaving only in a diving bell to reach the ocean floor. The risky work—mistakes in maintaining the appropriate pressure would be fatal—comes with a lucrative payout, vital to each of the six for different reasons. Things get even more difficult when one of Brooke’s fellow divers is found dead inside the group’s capsule. Though it may have been an accident, the death causes the cohort’s trust to fracture—and when a second member of their party dies, to shatter. Is one of them killing the others to keep the money for themselves? Dean maintains unyielding strain on his characters, brilliantly riffing on a classic setup while flexing his gifts for style and characterization. The results are gripping. Agent: Kate Burke, Blake Friedmann Literary. (Aug.)