ATLANTIS FIRE

Six amateur American divers in the Aegean find themselves involved in the operations of a Greek smuggling ring while uncovering what may be the lost civilization of Atlantis; and all this makes for a lively first novel that is distinguished mainly by its lung-bursting melodrama. The Americans--including Greek-American Sarkis, dessicated English lit teacher Eliot, and Eliot's frustrated wife Jessie--are looking for sunken ships from the Minoan age when a police cruiser interrupts their activity and impounds their permits and passports. Bouboulis, an elegant patrician thug on Mykonos whose huge villa is a brilliant showcase of ancient treasures, has put the law onto them so that he can both prevent their discovery of his own underwater digs and borrow their metal detector. Grudgingly, they help him out while Sarkis falls for Bouboulis' beautiful daughter. And everyone's after the lost diary of a vanished undersea explorer (lots of padding here), which Bouboulis manages to get hold of first. When the Americans at last sneak into Bouboulis' secret caves, they come onto a sunken treasure room full of ingots and a huge gilded bull, the god of Minoans a millenium before Greek civilization arose. Unsubtle humor and amateurish lapses intrude, but Goshgarian keeps everything moving--there's plenty of underwater knife and speargun fighting before the smoldering submerged volcano forming the lost island erupts; and, with some sunny sex thrown in, this is a bouncy, mindless entertainment full of eminently filmable aquatic action and scenic locales.