I recently read The Last One by Will Dean and absolutely loved it, so I jumped at the chance to read the Chamber. I was beyond excited when I was approved, and this did not disappoint. For anyone who loves a locked room mystery thriller this book is for you. And just for an extra element of anxiety this takes place in a pressurized chamber similar to a mini submarine. This book was a super-fast read and I will be sure to buy a copy on publication day.

If you are anything like me, you would never want to be confined into a small enclosed space, nor would you want to be a saturation diver, being deep within the ocean fixing that which needs to be fixed.

For the intrepid saturation divers, living within the confines of a hyperbaric chamber, they know the risks, the dangers, breathing helium, and being in quite close quarters. However, never did they dream of death caused by something unreal, something unknown, something that is stealing lives one by one.

They have four more days until the chamber can be brought up bit by bit, but will anyone of them survive, as another perishes in this what could be called a chamber of death.

Will Dean has created a frightening story, that is clever and filled with suspicion and danger. He includes many ideas and paints a vivid picture of what it is like to live and work in such an environment.

Thank you to Will Dean, Atria Books, and NetGalley for a copy of this story due out in August of this year.

Will Dean, does it again

I mean, did we expect anything else?

I completely fan-girled out last year after reading The Last One, and fell in love with Dean’s, writing style. Right then, after concluding, I knew that Will Dean, would join my list of "auto buy authors" .

I love the way Dean, throws us right into the chaos. The suspense is present early on. The character development is on point and each one of the characters come to life between the pages. The twist will get anyone and everyone’s pulse racing and left me in pure shock.

This is a MUST READ for everyone who loves thrillers, suspense, and even drama.

The Chamber is out August 6, 2024, you know what to do! Head on over to your favorite bookstore and pre-order this book!


Teaser :

Six experienced saturation divers are locked inside a hyperbaric chamber. Calm and professional, they know that rapid decompression would be fatal and so they work in shifts, breathing helium, and surviving in hot, close quarters.

Then one of them is found dead in his bunk.

With four days of decompression to go before the locked hatch to the chamber can be safely opened, the group must watch one another’s backs at all times. And when another diver is discovered unresponsive, everyone is on edge. What…or who…is taking them out one by one? And will any of them still be alive by the time the four days is up or will paranoia, exhaustion, suspicion, and pressure destroy them all?

Oh my goodness gracious. If you don’t have an acute case of both claustrophobia and thalassophobia by the time you’re halfway through this book, you’re better than I.

Six divers enter a hyperbaric chamber. Then they start dying, one by one. Even though those outside start the decompression process immediately after the first deceased person is found, the rest of the divers have to wait for four interminably long days before they can exit the chamber safely. Who’s responsible? Who can you trust?

Will Dean has definitely done his homework here, and it shows. You will get intimately acquainted with what it takes to become a saturation diver, the best of the best of the best. You’re locked in a small chamber for a month, and if you freak out and try to open the door…not only will you die, but all of your fellow divers will also perish in an exceedingly gruesome manner. You need to be extremely cool under pressure. If you have thoughts come into your head about getting out of the chamber, you need to banish those immediately.

Those pesky, intrusive thoughts. They could really get in the way of a successful dive for everyone. You better hope they go away. You better hope no one snaps.

All aboard!!

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria/Emily Bestler Books for the eARC. All opinions are mine.


(Side note: I don’t care what kind of money you throw at me, I will never be a diver. Not commercially and not even for recreation. The sheer fact that you can’t just rise immediately to the surface if there’s a problem….yeah, no. Not for me. My proverbial hat is off for those who can and do these dangerous jobs.)

Will Dean is an auto read for me and all of his books have been 5 stars.. This one was not as good but that just maybe because I am still thinking about last year's The Last One- book of the year for me! This book's ending was a little anticlimactic and made me feel I was missing something. The extreme amount of diving information and detail was too much. But, I would definitely recommend this one as Dean is still an amazing storyteller. I look forward to his next one! Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

The chamber by Will dean

Brooke is a woman in a man’s world, she is a skilled diver located in a hyperbaric chamber, with 5 other men. They are skilled in their trade and each one supports the other being calm and composed in this otherwise chaotic setting.

One of the divers is found dead in his bunk and the insanity really starts as other divers start falling ill. Will they make it out alive in the four days they have left to decompress?

What a wild ride in the world of divers! Holy moly this book was incredible on all accounts and it had me on the edge of my seat! Thank you NetGalley and Atria Books!

The chamber started off really strong. I like to scuba dive so I was very excited to read this book. The Chamber is very atmospheric and made me so claustrophobic and anxious at times. It did slow down some about half way through, and I found the ending a little anti-climactic, especially compared to Will Dean's other books. However, I did enjoy it and would recommend this book to readers looking for a good "who dunnit" book.

I'm not gonna lie, I almost DNF'd this one very early on because of how much detail it went into about dive boats (sorry for doubting you, Will Dean - I should have known better!). I found myself so invested in the story and wanted to learn more about this topic and had to stop several times throughout the book to google more information, pictures, etc so I can really imagine myself in the setting. and understand how claustrophobic it was.

The Chamber follows saturation diver, Ellen Brooke as she and a handful of other divers embark on a month-long journey to the bottom of the North Sea. They will be locked in a very small hyperbaric chamber with almost no personal space while taking turns diving to the bottom of the sea to fix an oil line. In order to survive a job like this, the team has to prioritize cleanliness and follow strict processes to make sure there is no chance of contamination to their environment. So, when the divers start mysteriously dying one by one, time is of the essence to figure out if this is some-thing or some-one causing it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for the advanced copy.

I sooooo wanted to love this one. It started off so strong. Dean is a master at building tension. The repetition of certain aspects of life in the chamber started to feel redundant but it was a master tool at making the reader feel just as claustrophobic and trapped as the characters. The first half or so I was all in, and couldn't read fast enough. By about 3/4 of the way in, I was starting to have my doubts about how this would wrap up. And by the end I was just so unsatisfied. There was too much ambiguity for me, and I wanted to know more about what was happening outside of the chamber. However, Dean will continue to be an auto-read author for me, he's incredibly talented at building a world that draws the reader right in.

I gravitated towards this book because it reminded me a bit of TJ Newman's books: angsty, terrifying, edge-of-your-seat anxiety and I'm glad to say it absolutely delivers! Definitely pick this up as a fun and quick summer read.

Not my favorite will dean book. This was too wordy and too much about diving. I didn’t enjoy this book. The end was good but I’m not really sure I fully understood it.

I don’t know that I’ve ever felt claustrophobic reading a book until now. This was INSANE! Full of Intensity and shock.

This just didn't work for me, It was really interesting at the beginning until about the 50% mark. I enjoyed reading and finding out more about sat divers but once the murders started, it seems like nothing happened in between. It wasn't the author's fault, the setting just doesn't allow for more action. Reading about a bunch of people cramped in a tiny chamber stopped being fun for a while.

I decided to give this author another chance after I DNF'd "The Last One" last year because I felt like the plot was so ridiculous, I could not stand it. This is no hate towards those who enjoyed the book, but it was not for me.
Explaining the plot in short is no difficult task because to me, there was not much plot. We get one POV throughout the entirety of the novel, and it is about 6 divers being sent on a contract job on a deep-sea vessel in the middle of the North Sea. I will say that when the North Sea was revealed as the destination in this book, the TikTok song played in my head. IYKYK. Then we get backstories from each character, and as expected from the blurb, the "one by one" trope was used, but in my opinion, not in a good way. Basically, the plot is just that, and the final 8% made me say "oh s***".
"The Chamber" is unfortunately no exception to the ridiculous plot as I mentioned above, except I did not DNF it. I felt like the plot was far-fetched and outlandish like some thrillers are, but in this instance, it was not done in a good way. I was interested in finding out the ending, but I truly did not connect or relate to any of the characters and what they were going through off-shore and onshore. I am sad to say that this book was boring the first 92% with the occasional intense scene of a member being unalived. As someone who works in the medical field, the medical aspects of the thriller were interesting to read, but that is putting it lightly. I do still want to keep giving this author a chance, but I knew when I had to get through a few pages of words and definitions frequently used in the world of diving and the logistics, I had a strong feeling I would dislike this novel. All in all, I did not hate this, but I did not enjoy it either. If you are someone who is interested in the world of diving and locked-room mystery taking place within a very small chamber and repetitive and tedious chapters explaining backstories of different diving experiences from each character, then this might be for you. The ending was interesting, but by the time I made it to the ending, I did not really care what was unaliving the divers, one by one. In my opinion, this book needed more plot and character development but written in a compelling way instead of an uninteresting way. The very end was confusing because the "twist" that was used happened pretty all of a sudden, and I'm sure the final scene was supposed to be intense, but I found it comical and not realistic at all. Yes, I obviously disliked this book. Am I trying to deter you from reading it? Absolutely not. Proceed with caution. I have seen a lot of good reviews. You may like/love it. Sometimes I am on outlier land. LOL.
Thank you to Atria Books for allowing me to read this ARC in exchange for my honest opinions. I am sorry that this book did not work for me, but I hope it reaches the intended audience.
2.5 stars from me (the .5 is because I was on edge and laughing so dang hard during the final 8% of the book, LOL)

Ellen Brooke is an experienced saturation diver who is setting off on a typical dive with five others. Below the surface, there’s a mysterious death of one of the divers without a reasonable explanation. The divers must be brought to the surface but can’t be released until their chamber undergoes decompression for four days. Will the remaining divers survive?

This is a very eerie and claustrophobic locked room mystery. The setting alone allows suspense to build and provides atmosphere and creepy tension to the story. I enjoyed learning about saturation diving, because it’s a topic I previously knew little about. However, the thrilling elements weren’t focused on as much as they could have been and the tension and suspicion could have been built up more amongst the divers. Parts of the book were a bit slow moving and there weren’t any major twists like I hope to find in a thriller. Overall, this is an average read and one that I think certain readers might enjoy, especially those who prefer a less intense thriller or mystery.

Thank you to Will Dean, Atria books, and Netgalley for the arc and the opportunity to be an early reader and reviewer.

As someone who is severely scared of the ocean and has claustrophobia, this story gave me literal goosebumps.

Six divers are locked in a very small vessel at the bottom of the sea for their job repairing oil pipes. One of them is found dead and they’re unsure what has caused his death. Then they start to die one by one while they slowly depressurize to open the hatch and get back to land. The details of how slow the time moves in such a tiny space underwater while they wait to possibly die will have your anxiety sky rocketing.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Unfortunately this one missed the mark for me. I really wanted to love it after my obsession with The Last One. I love a locked room thriller, and had really high hopes for this one. However, I feel that it leaned too heavily on how dangerous the environment was, at the expense of moving the plot forward. The danger was spelled out for the reader on almost every page, and at points it felt like a guide to deep sea diving.

I am SO SAD that I did not love this book more. I loved The Last One so much, I recommend it to so many people, but this book did not hit the same mark.

The concept for this book is amazing and I was so hyped to read this, but the book starts really slow and takes awhile to get going. We get a lot of information dumped on us in the first few chapters and not much is happening. Once we start getting into the book, the pacing is still off and there are a lot of side story telling and filler about cleaning, that don’t seem like they contribute anything to the plot or twist. The reveal and ending also left me confused and disappointed.

Overall, a really unique concept and it definitely had some stressful and claustrophobic moments, but I think I would have enjoyed this much more if some if it was cut down and there was more tension and drama.



**Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the Advanced Reader Copy!

I really wanted to like this as the premise sounded so interesting! And I was definitely invested for the first 30% or so but then everything got repetitive and boring. I kept reading to find out how it all ended but that just confused me more! Meh.

I had to remind myself to breathe throughout this entire story- from page 1 all the way to the very last! With his words, Will Dean brings you right into the chamber and makes you feel exactly what the divers are feeling- the pressure, the emotions, all the things. It was suspenseful and claustrophobic and terrifying all at once. I loved every single second of it! A true ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ for me! Thank you so much to NetGalley and Atria Books for this ARC of The Chamber by Will Dean. It was amazing!