There are bits of dialogue about cubic feet of water flow screaming over spillways that might make the average reader consider a small yawn here or there, but as a science person, I LOVED that mathematical voodoo! The author is an engineer and took great pains with his research - it made the entire thing very believable. The chapters are headed by time stamps and locations: 9:47am, Las Vegas. What was well done here is that there were sub-groups of characters in various danger zones so that we palpably felt the physical threat, but the protagonist himself was busy pursuing a more cerebral task. When one thinks of a disaster book or movie, say, Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno (geez, I'm old.) we generally get a bunch of heroics with people trying to escape. I'm not saying that the book is fine literature, but the author did win awards for a first-time novelist. Instead, it is your average dad - a middle-aged civil engineer in a polo shirt, armed with a calculator.
When one of the dams is targeted by an unknown terrorist or group, it is not the FBI or the police who are the ones capable of understanding the implications or how to best find the perpetrator.
The story's hero is an engineer who works for the Bureau of Reclamation - the agency responsible for all the dams across the US. This disaster-thriller is a fun, clean MUST READ for anyone headed out to the Grand Canyon for vacation, particularly if you are going to stop at Hoover Dam, are hiking or rafting the Grand Canyon, boating on Lake Powell, or climbing into the slot canyons near the Glen Canyon Dam.
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