First of all, what's Serial Box? It's a venue that offers an eclectic variety of fiction in serial form--both ebooks and audiobooks, packaged as serials. The audio versions have high production values. As with buying both the Kindle ebook and the Audible audiobook of the same book, you can switch back and forth between ebook and audio while keeping your latest point in the story fairly seamlessly.
What's different than the Kindle/Audible combo purchase: It's all one purchase, and it's designed as a serial, with separate, contained episodes in a continuing story. You move forward in the larger story, but each episode has its own beginning, middle, and end.
The Triangle is about an expedition organized to investigate recent disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle, a US Navy ship, and a small plane carrying the pilot, the man who hired the plane, and his young daughter, Olivia. The team includes a retired vice admiral, David Saguara, NTSB agent Tess Dumont, IT data recovery specialist Mike Hammond, and two Navy junior officers. Or at least, that's the Vice Admiral's plan. Bestselling conspiracy theorist Alexander McBride somehow catches wind of it and manages to attach himself to it on pain of exposing the expedition if he's excluded.
And when they are aboard a small boat, headed for the coordinates they have for the apparent site of the disappearances, a police boat from one of the Caribbean Islands (I don't think which one was named) commanded by Lt. Maria St. Clair, pursues them for reasons that seem sensible at the time, and when things start to get a little crazy, manages to attach herself (just herself, not the crew of the police boat) to the expedition as well.
And then the reality of the Bermuda Triangle rears its bizarre head, and a very strange storm comes up. It's not long before they are shipwrecked and only just manage to get ashore on what soon proves to be a very strange island.
With each episode, things get stranger and stranger. They find the little girl, Olivia, but her father and the pilot didn't survive. There are two islander boys whose story of how they arrived there only makes sense in terms of conditions prevailing a decade earlier. An older couple in a very nice yacht. A strange, old recluse who is really serious about maintaining his isolation.
And then there's the Soviet nuclear submarine. Not Russian. Soviet.
These things are not their only clues that time is odd and unpredictable on the island they're stranded on.
This is a great Bermuda Triangle conspiracy thriller, and a lot of fun. I loved the characters, and the interplay of both their personalities and their talents. I found the serial structure very nice, too, both dramatically, and in giving compact segments for listening, easing the sometimes fraught question of exactly where to press "stop" when listening to an audiobook runs up against that annoying point where you have to start paying full attention to whatever else you're doing.
Highly recommended.
I received this first season of The Triangle, both audio and eArc, from Serial Box, and am reviewing it voluntarily.
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