Reviewed by Dev Raman
Thrillers, biographies, anything I can finish on a flight. Impatient with slow openings.
How Dev got the book RNKD provided this reviewer with a copy of the book. No cash payment was made for the review, and the author or publisher had no involvement.
A submarine, a leak, and a clock. It does exactly one thing and does it very well. I read it in two sittings and the second one was supposed to be sleep.
Grant's trick is that the "protocol" of the title is a real, boring, bureaucratic procedure, and the whole book is about what happens when six people have to follow it while lying to each other. There's no genius villain. There's a spreadsheet, a deadline, and a very cold sea. I found that much scarier than the usual stuff.
The prose is plain to the point of invisible, which is right for this. Characters are thin — you get one trait each and that's your lot. The chief engineer is a set of forearms. It doesn't matter. This isn't that kind of book and it never pretends to be.
Four rather than five because the last twenty pages tidy up something that was better left messy. Read it on a plane. Ideally not one over water.