The Chamber by Will Dean
I give this book 4.75 stars.

HIGH PRESSURE OUTSIDE
On a boat heading out into the North Sea, Ellen Brooke steels herself to spend almost a month locked inside a hyperbaric chamber with five other divers. It is a close knit team and it has to be: any error or loss of trust could be catastrophic.

EXTREME PRESSURE INSIDE
All is going to plan until one of the divers is found unresponsive in his bunk.Four days of bare steel, intrusive thoughts, and the constant struggle not to give way to panic.And if someone does unlock the door, everyone dies...

Excellent! Outstanding! ……. I couldn’t put this page turner down!
The author’s writing style and superb plotting and pace always has me on the edge of my seat. A perfect mix, the tension and dread are palpable and the atmosphere is totally claustrophobic. I became immersed in Brooke the only woman on boards narrative right from the start. The author had obviously done a lot of research on SAT diving and i enjoyed learning something I had no knowledge of. Six go down but how many return. Would i recommend this,absolutely to everyone but especially if you enjoy a locked chamber mystery
With thanks to Netgalley,Will Dean and Hodder and Stoughton for my chance to read and review this book.

OMG, I couldn’t breathe, literally. The thought of being stuck without oxygen and daylight set my senses tingling and when the deaths started I wanted to rush to the end to discover ‘who Dunnit’ and so I could feel like I could take a breath. I kept changing my mind over who the murderer was but also couldn’t figure out how it had happened. At times I thought it was via food, water, air etc. The thought of being kept in a tight space with dead bodies almost pushed me over the edge. After reading this I then bought another Will Dean as I enjoyed it so much.

Utterly gripping, I couldn’t put this down and read it in a day. It was tense, face paced and original. The detail to the technical knowledge needed and the way the author enabled us to experience the life of a sat diver was exemplary. The unfolding backstory meant some twists and turns and we were kept guessing till the end. In fact, I feel I’m still guessing some what. This isn’t a story where everything is neatly tied up and presented to the reader with a bow on top. There is some ambiguity that will make for a great discussion post publication I’m sure.

A small group of divers have been paid incredibly well to live in a hyperbaric chamber for around a month. Their job is to dive to the bottom of the sea bed and repair oil pipes. The job is incredibly dangerous and everyone relies on everyone being diligent and professional.
But when a member of the team is found unresponsive in his bunk, the group becomes tense, fractious and suspicious of each other, especially as that member had never ventured from his bunk all day.
With a four day wait for decompression of the chamber to happen, mind games start to play on the remaining group. After all if someone doesn’t unlock the chamber they will all die.
I’m not sure I’ve read such a taut tense book like this before.
This really is the ultimate locked in mystery.
This is a testament of a writer that is on top of their game. I found myself transfixed and uncomfortable at the same time, but in a good way.
Will Dean really is a fine and clever writer and I found this book to be astonishingly good.

What a read! This is a proper locked room drama. Where you really have no idea who is killing people and how until the story starts to unravel right at the end. I really liked the ending of which I shall say no more….

I think the writing and detail of the chamber was great as it did really create the sense of being confined in a small space and at times how difficult and boring it must be especially with nothing to do but wait. The characters added to the sense of atmosphere too as they felt quite on edge and with their own demons.

How can a book set in one tiny chamber be fast paced and frightening? Just add one Will Dean.
A really unusual mystery which did nothing to ease my claustrophobia and which I zipped through in one day. A definite must read.

I would give this book 6 stars if that was an option.

Genuinely the most claustrophobic, intense, terrifying book I have read in my life!

There are so many twists, turns, and revelations that I never knew what was coming next. The closer I got to the end, the faster I read because I NEEDED to know.

Will Dean is a master of terror and tension!

I’m not going to lie, i have never been particularly interested in books set under the sea, or about diving etc, but when a new Will Dean book comes out, it doesn’t really matter what it’s about. I just have to read it.
Knowing very little about the diving world, I was extremely grateful for the glossary at the beginning of the book, and without out, I would have felt a bit lost. Saying that I still had to do a bit of googling, as I like to be able to visualise in my head what I’m reading, and a lot of the equipment and machinery I’d never seen before.
Without giving too much of the story away, this is essentially a locked room murder mystery, set in a hyperbaric chamber with six saturation divers, under the North Sea. It was certainly a page turner and very tense right the way through. It was also extremely repetitive, and a lot of the things that happened just felt like the exact same thing, over and over, but with a different character name each time. I did not like the main character at all. I found her arrogant and extremely entitled, with the opinion that her job is much much harder than everybody else’s. I hope no astronauts read this book! I also found the end very confusing and had to go back and read the last chapter again, as I felt as if I’d missed something? I will never think of raspberry jam in the same way again! I didn’t love this book, butI didn’t hate it either. It did keep my attention however, and I read it in one night.

Thanks to the author, publisher, and Netgalley for a chance to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

This was an odd one. It was completely gripping and somehow well paced despite not much actually happening. With six divers locked in a very small space or mini submarine for over a week the 'action' consists mostly of endless reminiscing, protocols and cleaning. Even the deaths are pretty undramatic - more silent collapses. Yet the tense atmosphere, fascinating insight into a little known and high-risk environment, unique mix of characters and intrigue of the ultimate locked room murder are somehow addictive. Annoyingly the ending was written with a little doubt and misdirection so I'm not sure I completely got it and who was actually to blame. So all-in-all a mixed bag and completely different to the author's previous action-packed plot but enjoyable nonetheless.

The Chamber is a locked-room mystery with a difference…our characters are locked in a diving chamber hundreds of feet below the ocean’s surface.
The story is simple. Six divers begin the job. One is found dead in their bunk early on. A number of other deaths take place while the divers are stuck in their chamber, eventually leaving just two. It’s a tense race against time to try and establish what has happened and who is responsible.
From the outset I confess that much of the terminology used left me rather cold. However, what Dean conveyed skilfully was the psychological impact on the divers of their jobs and the risks they face every time they take on a job. I got bored of reading about the risk of them turning to raspberry jam if protocol wasn’t followed, but I thoroughly enjoyed the focus on how they reacted to changing circumstances.
I felt the pacing lost impact slightly. Once they had reached the surface events were somewhat rushed, although I can’t help but feel there is a delightful ambiguity to the way things are left.
It didn’t do anything to allay my fear of being stuck under water in a confined space, but it certainly gripped me and entertained me. Huge thanks to the author and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read and review this.

Will Dean does it again. What an incredible writer. The Chamber is one of those books that hooks you in. The descriptions so clear that you truly get a picture of life for saturation divers. The sheer claustrophobia, being dependable on others for everything. Then what happens when things start to go wrong.

The author is definitely cementing his place amongst those I watch out for time and time again.

Wow!

You know how thrilers are often described as “nail-biting” or “nerve-shredding” as a massively exaggerated explainer of their high-stakes? The Chamber, the sixth novel by high-concept thriller powerhouse Will Dean, has delivered a novel that is, without question, one of the tensest things I have ever read? My nails? Bitten. My nerves? Shredded.

The Chamber is written from the first-person perspective of Ellen Brooke, an experienced saturation diver. Along with 6 others, she’s on a mission to the bottom of the North Sea. Brooke’s work is highly specialised and dangerous; together with her fellow divers, she bunks down in a tiny metal capsule 100m below the surface for weeks at a time, cut off from the world around them and completely reliant on their onshore caretakers. If you are in any way claustrophobic, this work will put the fear of god in you, as it did me – and the stakes get higher ater about 20% into the book, when one of the divers aboard dies in his bunk. But the divers need to decompress their sub slowly – it’ll take 4 days, in fact. All the while not knowing who the killer – if there is one – is. And so, a fascinating novel about a terrifying, niche line of work becomes a fascinating, terrifying locked-room thriller.

Will Dean is so good at suspense and atmosphere as well as being wildly intelligent in both concept and execution, and this one is no different. The Chamber draws the reader into an entirely new world – Dean has done some amount of research; there’s even a glossary of terms at the beginning. We are given enough information to educate us on a topic most of us probably know very little about, but we aren't overly bogged down in details.

The Chamber is a masterclass in tension; by taking a deeply (heh) claustrophobic scenario and making it – somehow – worse! My god, the situation these divers find themselves in is hellish. I physically recoiled from this book a few times; Dean doesn’t spare the reader the horrors of this line of work, both actual and hypothetical. “Bacterial ear rot” is a string of words I never want to read again, and I will never see raspberry jam the same way.

The novel is pacy but never too fast; perhaps I would have liked a slightly longer epilogue as I was left with many, many questions at the end of this one. Maybe it was because I read this one sick in bed but I did finding the ending ambiguous to the point of confusion.
There’s so much at play here – Ellen’s position as one of the only women in her line of work, the fact that the whole thing is jammed with MacBeth references – it’s a lot to take in. But Dean manages to keep all the plates spinning impressively. A queasy, terrifying, jaw-dropping thriller that I won’t forget in a hurry.

I’ve read everything that Will Dean has written - the fabulous Tuva Moodyson series and his several stand-alone novels.
Every single time he has a new book published, I’m always of the opinion that this one is his best yet. But this time, no really, definitely this time, I can hold up my hand and state that The Chamber is definitely his best so far!!
It’s hard to go too far into the plot without giving away any spoilers, so my review will just be me raving about how much I enjoyed this book.
Considering this was written by a man who lives in a forest in Sweden, Will Dean must have done some seriously hefty research into the subject matter - the life of Saturation Divers working on the North Sea bed.
Even if there was no plot, I would still have given this book five stars for the fascinating insight about how these crews live and work in tiny chambers and diving bells for weeks at a time before they have to slowly decompress before they can re-surface.
The level of descriptive detail about how intensely claustrophobic and dangerous the job is and how much reliance there has to be with trust in their co-divers was just brilliant.
I cannot recommend The Chamber highly enough.
But I’m left with one question: What the hell can Will Dean write next that can beat this??
I can’t wait to find out!

Tension tension tension.

There were times when I was reading this book that I felt I couldn't breathe. The writing was so vivid I could imagine myself in the chamber with them all.

The tension was palpable the whole way through, it never let up. As the deaths started happening I grew more and more desperate for them to get out of the chamber and to discover what was happening.

I couldn't help but draw some small comparison to those who lost their lives last year while trying to see the titanic wreckage.

Excellent writing, great, story. The ending left me hungry for more.

Another brilliant, unique book from Will Dean. When I read the couple of pages of glossary explaining diving terms at the beginning of the book my heart sank. I thought I really don't need a book so complicated I need to learn a new language to understand it. However, that definitely was not the case. Dean soon has you confined in the tiny chamber with six divers far far down under the North sea. Then the deaths begin! The tension he creates wondering who is going to be next?....is anyone going to survive?.......how is it being done when they're never alone or unwatched? A wonderful read. The ultimate locked room thriller.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advance copy. All opinions are my own.

In The Chamber we are taken on a tense and claustrophobic journey into a hyperbaric diving chamber. Ellen and her crew-mates descend to the ocean floor for a month-long assignment, when a tragic incident cuts their mission short. Trapped in the chamber during decompression, the divers face a series of unexplained deaths, leaving them questioning who they can trust and what lurks in the depths with them.
Another gripping thriller from this renowned author, one that keeps you guessing until the end. If you enjoy heart-pounding thrillers then this book is for you! .

When readers ask for a locked room mystery, the chamber by Will Dean is literary it.
When six experiences saturation divers descends to the depth of the North Sea in a hyperbaric chamber. To live and work on the ocean floor. But when of the divers, one of the youngest of the crew suddenly dies. Their work is cut short, and they are told to return to the surface. In that time of decompression, more divers die, and everyone wonders what the hell is going on and the trust between the remaining members die with them.
I have mixed feelings of the authors work and some of his books for me personally are a hit of a miss. The Chamber is a hit for me. This is a fab locked room mystery, with its fresh and unique storyline. Whilst reading this I could feel the tension between the air between the divers and also made me feel a bit claustrophobic been in close contact with others. This is a great page turner. 4 stars from me.

Will Dean is one of my favourite authors – his reads are always fast-paced thrillers, and each one is unique in its premise. The Chamber, set in a hyperbaric diving chamber is no exception and I was so excited to start reading.

It’s clear that a lot of research has gone into this book which is certainly to be commended. The story is told through the eyes of Ellen, a veteran diver who is attempting to record various aspects of the dives to inspire more women to get into the field. It’s such a fascinating glimpse into an industry I know nothing about (although, it hasn’t inspired me to want to take the plunge!). When one of their number is found dead, the stakes get higher and higher as the divers have to wait out the slow climb to the surface together in close proximity. It really is a high-pressure read, leaving you breathless at every turn and I found myself racing through the book, unable to put it down. It’s a fantastic setting for a thriller and one that works well for the ‘locked room’ style narrative.

Unfortunately, I had a few niggles with this book that I have not experienced with Will Dean’s work before, but I think it still warrants a 5-star review overall. It can be a little repetitive in places, mainly down to world-building a setting and an industry that not many people know much about and trying to ensure that information is absorbed by the reader. Also, although I loved the rest of the book, the ending felt very rushed and although I enjoyed the conclusion, I didn’t really understand the motivations behind it.

Overall, The Chamber is another hit from Will Dean – a fast-paced, high-pressure thriller in a fantastically unique setting. Thank you to NetGalley & Hodder & Stoughton for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I thoroughly enjoyed the reading of THE CHAMBER by Will Dean - after huge anticipation and build up, the first 90% of the book was exceptional - I had a brilliant, breathless time reading this book! As a huge fan of Will Dean, I was thrilled to see him following a 'North Sea TikTok Trend' and he executed the journey perfectly.

I was slightly disappointed by the ending, but solely because it felt a little anticlimactic because of the brilliance of the bulk of the book, and the extra sting in the tail in the ending of THE LAST PASSENGER - which we're all still reeling from!

Firstly a big thank you to the publishers For my early access in exchange for a honest review.
I’m a big fan of will deans books , he puts the capital T in tension by creating escapism within words.

This was a claustrophobic and unsettling read and you really feel like you’re in the setting .

You always know you’re in for a journey with one of wills books and this certainly went places I’m certainly not going to visit in my daily life !

Highly recommend if you enjoy your thrillers with a difference .