What a ride! Steve Alten delivered once again!

I was captivated from the first page. Throughout the whole book, I found myself alternatively holding my breath in fear and gasping in anticipation. Hell's Aquarium is the right amount of espionage and thrill interspersed with the horror in the deep I've come to know and love with Alten's works!

Alten writes such dynamic characters. You can't help but to learn them inside and out and to really feel what they're feeling, even the ones you hate. He has such a masterful way of developing his characters and it's a real privilege to be along for this journey and to see the different ways the characters grow into their own. And if I've come to learn anything throughout the series, it's people should really listen to Jonas......so much trouble would be avoided that way!

My only complaint is Dr. Stelzer. Whenever his name came up, I constantly read him as Dr. Seltzer **facepalm** Beyond that, this was a brilliant read. It went so quick and, before I knew it, I was done. Bring on Night Stalkers!

As the three before this.. I really enjoyed it, even though it's a thick mass market it reads very quickly...

A prologue with a quick history of Earth‘s geological history and a brief summary of marine evolution all the way to the Megalodon, followed by a first chapter that summarizes the previous books, interspersed with the beginning of this book‘s plot. In third person present tense. Not a fan of third person present tense, it‘s weird. Anyway...

Jonas’s son, “David is off to Dubai for the summer of his life, not realizing that he is being set up to lead an expedition that will hunt down and capture the most dangerous creatures ever to inhabit the Earth.“ (sorry, I stole that from the book blurb...)

Jonas has his own toothy problems to deal with back home at the Tanaka Institute in Monterey. Parallel plots with alternating locations, as in previous books. Which is a bummer, when every other chapter ends in a cliffhanger. The alternating plotlines add a nice urgency to the proceedings though.

I looked up and learned things about the Phillippine Sea Plate and its tectonics. And I looked up a ton of extinct, prehistoric beasts. Educational! I was constantly googling images of weird sharks, with teeth sticking allover the place or monstrous bony fish or gelatinous vampire squid or... it kept going. The later part of the book basically turns into Lost World at the Bottom of the Sea. I am keeping my fingers crossed for a sequel to the first movie with a very heavy dose of well-done CGI! Although I am having a hard time picturing Jason Statham with the hair of Anderson Cooper and in his 60s...

I wish Alten‘s writing would get better with consecutive books. He should be able to afford an editor at least, after one of his books was turned into a movie, right? At least to check for correct punctuation, to tone down those info dumps to a necessary amount, integrate them more smoothly into the general narrative and to get rid of the truly superfluous stuff. I am turning a blind eye to the politically incorrect bits and lack of correct representation of pretty much everything.

At the end of the ebook we get to read the prologue and first two chapters of the next book, Nightstalkers. I enjoyed that, too, and almost downloaded it straight away. The entertainment value of these books is great. And, hey, the next book seems to be in the third person past tense... nonetheless, I can‘t possibly give this more than three stars, because of its barely tolerable writing.

“Welcome to Hell’s Aquarium. Unruly guests will be eaten.”

Do the review…
NO….
Do it…
No…
DO IT!!!
Okay okay maybe that will stop the nightmares.
This is the fourth book of the Meg series….with note that Meg, the first of the giant sharks died in book 1. 
Where to start…maybe I should say that the series has jumped the shark…but that has already happened…repeatedly in this series.
Spoilers
So continuing the, if it had one monster in the first movie/book, there should be two in the second, three in the third…we ended up with a book full of uncountable monsters.
We find out that in this book the Mariana trench is not the deepest depth of the ocean. Instead the deepest part of the ocean is the middle of the earth.
Having fully exploited four of the five oceans the author creates a new imaginary ocean under ground underneath another ocean. Oceanception
This ocean is home to giant fishes, giant air breathing/evolved gill dinosaurs, giant dolphins, (it’s like Trump…everything is huge)hot and cold running water a WW2 boat and underwater habitats.
An Saudi Arabian prince having watched Jurassic Park has decided that it was actually a documentary of a good thing and builds the worlds largest aquarium…times six. Yes in the middle of the dessert he has built 6 of the worlds largest aquariums. And while I would be happy to put pretty fishes and whales and small sharks into five of the tanks, I would put a goldfish in the sixth to see if they really do grow to the size of their environment, he has decided to fill them up with sea monsters.
Characters:
Jonas: He is still a terrible person. He is now fourth Indian Jones old. Wanting nothing more than to sit in his recliner and read books he is still in charge of the Tanaka Institute. I am guessing he has Alzheimer as he seems to have forgotten his intense hatred of the sharks from earlier books and has continued in the business, despite everyone telling him to leave. He is still immortal surviving bungee diving into a tank with two megalagdon sharks.
Terry: She is Jonas’ wife. I put it like that because her only role in this book is to be married to Jonas and to get upset and yell. (Steve sure knows how to write women characters.)
Danielle: Jonas Daughter. Promoted from eye candy in a bikini, this was really what she was called, in the last book she is eye candy in nicer clothing in this book. She gets hit hard in the head…so hard that she forgets she’s in the book till the very end when she shows back up. (Diversity)
David: Jonas’ son and his heir to the writers Mary Sue. He is 21, well a few months shy, and offered a lot of money to catch underwater monsters. The Saudi Arabian prince uses a woman to get him to do the work. He is like the underwater monster whisperer because no matter what he says, it turns out to be right when it comes to the monsters. If he said the best way to capture one would be to put a piece of cheese on a shoe and to drop it into the ocean, you better take your shoe off because it is now effective monster bait.
Kaylie: She was hired to seduce David Taylor. And like any plan where a woman is hired to be bait she falls in love with him…you know the line “It was a job at first but then…” She and David have a long happy life together until she gets eaten by a Lipleuerodon, (underwater giant crocodile of course.) This drives David insane.
Mac: No longer an alcoholic. In the last three books he has crashed three helicopters and one boat. In this book he crashes a sub…into three different bodies of water…all within five minutes.
The Sharks:
Angel: Mother of the shark babies, she is the main bad guy/girl until Jonas finds bigger monsters then just like the comic books she and Jonas team up together to fight greater evils. Until she gets eaten. She is pregnant for the second time.
Scarface: Father of three of the five babies. Gets eaten within the first few pages.
Angelica: She is one of the babies. She gets eaten by her sisters. She is pregnant
Mary Kate and Ashley (they let the internet name the sharks): They get sold to the Saudi Prince. One of them drowns. They were pregnant
Elizabeth and Bella: Two smaller sharks they live in the tank until at the end some animal rights people let them go. They thank the people by eating them. They are pregnant.
Most of the book is all the characters boating from one place to another almost getting killed, well except for Kaylee she succeeds at that splendidly. Some monsters are caught oh and we learn that there are shark clones.
If you notice I mention the one male shark in this story dies within the first pages. Yet not willing to let the series die Steven makes the sharks able to reproduce both by sexual and by parthenogenesis methods, ie apparently they can make themselves pregnant when there are no men around. So we are left with shark clones.

kept me entertained for 3 hour drives on the weekends. i’m someone who has always been entertained by sharks and prehistoric creatures, and if i hadn’t been, i wouldn’t have lasted past chapter one. pretty campy but did not expect much for a book about megaladons in the 21st century

This one might tie with my favorite with the original. There's just so much more to this book. As with every meg story, the amount of gruesome and death still highlights. But now we have ancient species and an ancient sea added to the mix.
With David falling prey to words the way Jonas has before, we are practically reading a young Jonas story. Including a fast love story. As with Meg, I'm not fond of the love story. And well, the way it ends...fantastic.

It was okay up until the end which was so thrown together and then cut off that it hardly made sense.

I enjoyed this installment a lot more than the previous two. This one got back to the things I really enjoyed about the first book. I did again listen to a majority of this in audiobook, but I also picked up a physical copy from my library. The physical copy included pictures of the other animals mentioned in this installment, which were very interesting. Looking forward to the next one!