Book Review: Megalodon in Paradise by Hunter Shea

Island life can be deadly.

For Ollie Arias, owning an island in Micronesia is beyond his wildest dreams. Moving his best friends from college to share his dream…priceless. A little urban exploration of the abandoned military lab unearths strange, dark secrets. And awakens a slumbering beast that has gone decades without food. Ollie and his pals have unwittingly unleashed a deadly infection above, and a prehistoric killing machine below. The storm of the century is headed their way. Paradise has never been so close to hell.

My Review:
When Ollie wins a fortune on the lottery he buys a private island and encourages his old friends from college to give up their lives and go and live there with him. It seems the ideal place with endless beaches, a beautiful sea view and houses built to have everything needed. nine months later, they are all living the dream. However the island was once owned by the US military including a secret lab where a modified megalodon is housed, asleep and unaware of anything-until it is accidently roused by the exploring of the new residents. Now a storm and other dangers are on the way and the megalodon is very hungry...

I honestly wasn't sure what to expect from this one. Yes I love any kind of scary shark creature feature and I'm a fan of the author, so that was good but I was unsure about the plot. I mean, if you are on an island that is well supplied with houses on it, why should a megalodon be so scary when it is in the water and can't reach you? In the long term it could be an issue getting re-supplied with a monster shark roaming around but is it scary in the short term for the story? The answer of course is yes! The shark can now get in and out of the lab and into the water, circling the island looking for prey. It is soon going to get a lot closer to them as the storm hits the island and the flooding begins.

This book had everything. It starts with the group of friends and the people working on the island, who are all likeable enough. Things start going wrong when Lenny decides that he wants to explore the lab that is there so off we go on their merry way. Once inside, they accidently trigger the feeding mechanism which is designed to wake the shark and they flee safely from the area. But Lenny is curious about whether anything is alive in the lab and decides that he needs to go back to be sure. This decision turns out to be a very bad one for the group in general. However, Marco is also about to bring trouble of a different kind down on the island when his dodgy deals start to catch up with him, putting their lives at risk again. The last thing they need is to see evidence of the megalodon and know that the coming storm is going to trap them there but that is just the beginning of their problems.

We also get a bit of the back story to the lab which was quite interesting and how the shark came to be there. We see what the scientists did to 'train' it and what exactly they fed it! It explains the behaviour of the shark through the book and I liked seeing that side of the story. I liked the 1954 tale and the way is was mixed in with the up to date disaster that was happening. As the story progressed, the danger and tension ramped up as the various story threads laid out all began to collide and the island paradise became a total death trap for everyone there.

I really enjoyed this story! I liked what Shea did with the shark, the storm and the unwanted visitors. It was fun to see how the story developed and there was plenty action to keep most readers happy. It had that mad scientist element to the classic creature feature story which was entertaining and of course there was the shark itself. I do enjoy a good megalodon story, mainly because I believe that these guys could be living in some deep sea trench waiting to eat people! This was one of my favourite Shea stories so far and I hope to read a lot more of his books next year.

Read July 2018.
4 stars.