Billionaire Jackson Riggs has a plan: raise the Titanic! Currents and bacteria are steadily eating away at it, so if the Mary Rose can be brought to surface, why not the big T? (Well, 40 feet versus 12,500 feet….) So he does, to no international friction whatsoever beyond a reporter asking him if he feels strange at all disturbing a mass grave. The ruin (presumably just the bow, since the stern is a crumbled mess) is put on display in the very shipyards that built it, and the locals — demonstrating an astonishing knowledge of history — are a bit uncomfortable with that. It’s like the doomed ship has come back to haunt the community that built it. And…so it has, because not only do bits of the ship begin falling off and destroying people (tut tut, they should’ve worn gloves and helmets), but then people began committing suicides-by-drowning at 2:20 am, the very minute that Titanic surrendered to the cold deep of Oceanus. Evidently the ol’ girl still possesses the spirits of those who died aboard her, and they’re taking out their revenge on the descendants of those who built her!

…and that’s the story. It’s really just a novella. Can’t say I was impressed by it: the initial premise is interesting, but there’s no consideration given on how difficult an enterprise raising a substantial part of the Titanic would be, either from a physical point of view or from the fact that outcry would be huge. At the moment robots can photograph the interior of the bow and do shot-for-shot comparisons, seeing things as they were — if sunk. Begin moving the ship, though, and all manner of disturbance is going to happen inside, so I can imagine the scientific community alone getting incensed about this prospect. We see none of that here, though, and the mass suicides are only creepy when we witness the first one, and after that there’s a lot of cops wandering around thinking all this is really weird, and then someone else dies a different way and the story ends. There’s no unearthly whispering, no ghostly eyes of Captain Smith staring in recrimination at the billionaire, nothing really horror-like save for the first drowning scene. It’s not a developed story, to be frank.

On the bright side, this book made me aware that the Mary Rose wreck exists!