The Dive Trilogy (The Discovery, The Deep, and The Danger) is a middle-grade suspense series written by Gordon Korman in 2003. Like his earlier Everest Trilogy, the book follows four kids forming a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits and going somewhere few people have gone before. Kaz, Star, Dante, and Adrianna apply for a summer internship of diving in the Caribbean and are baffled at being chosen out of thousands of applicants. Star is graceful in the water but has cerebral palsy that hampers her movements on land, and the other three have perhaps a dozen prior dives between them. It becomes clear that they have been selected by a trio of mysterious so-called scientists who don't want expert divers snooping around a shady treasure hunt that ultimately leads to at least one murder, although the four teens set out to make the treasure hunters sorry for their choice of patsies and find the treasure themselves. There is also a series of flashbacks revealing how the treasure came to its resting place. These scenes are shown through the POV of Samuel Higgins, a fifteenth-century orphan who becomes the terrified cabin boy of a mass-murdering privateer named James Blade.
The series has no relation to DIVE!!
Tropes in the trilogy
- Artistic License – History: Captain Vanover tells the kids about a diver named Mel Fisher who is still in court fighting over the rights to the treasure he found aboard two Spanish Galleons off the coast of Florida. Fisher was a real person, but the trilogy was written in 2003, and Fisher won his court case in 1982 and died in 1998.
- Back-Alley Doctor: In the flashback scenes, wounded privateers are left to the not-so tender care of York the barber/dentist/sea doctor, a menacing figure whose main treatments seem to be amputations and maggot therapy.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Marina is the only one of the scientists who acts consistently welcoming and caring toward the divers, which sometimes causes them to forget that she's still manipulating them, dynamiting coral reefs, and trying to steal sunken treasure just like her partners. She is also willing to kill for the treasure, while her partners have a Heel–Face Turn rather than do the same.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Iggy Ocasek is a brilliant tinkerer and marine biologist, but he has no social skills and is introduced using a blowtorch and a mollusk shell to pop popcorn.
- Burial at Sea: After Caltain Vancover drowns and the other characters go to a lot of trouble to recover his body for his family, it turns out that he wanted to buried at sea anyway.
- Cool Uncle: Adrianna and her brother spend most summers with their archaeologist uncle, who has imparted a lot of knowledge to them, while their parents constantly neglect them. However, he only had one spot available for his latest trip and took Adrianna's brother, causing her to apply for the Caribbean expedition.
- Disability Superpower: Being color blind makes it difficult for Dante to take underwater photos at the right lighting, but it also keeps him from being distracted by how coral encased manmade objects are the same color as real coral and lets him notice when the texture is different from surrounding objects.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Captain Blade kills all of the prisoners from the Spanish galleon for little more reason than one of them throwing his gem-encrusted whip overboard in an effort to defend his Captain against Blade’s abuse.
- Do Not Go Gentle: In the penultimate flashback, Captain Blade murders the crew of the Spanish galleon and sets it on fire for good measure once he has moved the treasure to his own ship. He missed at least one Spanish sailor hiding below deck, and as the galleon burns, the Spaniard hurls a firebomb at the Griffin, which sets off a powder explosion and sends Blade and most of his crew to the bottom of the sea.
- Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Expressing concern for Star or wondering if she can keep up with the others due to her disability infuriates her and makes her double her efforts.
- Funny Foreigner: Downplayed with Menasce Gérard (aka English), the grouchy dive guide who is descended from native Caribbean tribes, French settlers, and one English castaway many generations back. His frustration at the hands of his young charges provides a lot of humor, but is also justified due to their dangerous inexperience, with English coming across as a Hyper-Competent Sidekick who saves their lives several times and also gets a lot more nuanced and approachable as time goes by.
- Line-of-Sight Name: In the Back Story Kaz quit playing hockey, after previously devoting every waking moment to the sport, due to the guilt that came with accidentally paralyzing another player. When his father and sports agent asked what else he wanted to do with his life, he came up blank and said he was interested in fish (leading to his applying for a diving internship) just because he was looking at a fish tank across the room.
- Mentor Occupational Hazard: Captain Vanover, who helps the kids with both diving and figuring out the lay of the land, is killed by Marina's sabotage at the end of The Deep.
- Murder by Inaction: A sympathetic version occurs in the final book of the trilogy. Privateer James Blade and his cabin boy Samuel are the only survivors of their ship. Samuel is clinging to the ship's floating figurehead and Blade is injured and barely able to stay above water. Blade's actions are responsible for the deaths of their shipmates, he murdered the entire crew of the Spanish galleon they just overtook and killed Samuel's best friend in the first book over a breach of discipline. Samuel turns the figurehead away from Blade and paddles towards the shore, leaving his captain to drown.
- Not Now, Kiddo: When the kids tell Dr. Gallagher that Cutter and his team are hunting treasure under suspicious circumstances rather than taking sonar readings, Gallagher says that he just runs the institute and doesn't have oversight over the various project teams who visit there, then sends them away without any signs of concern.
- Running Gag: Each book has a lot least one scene where English calls the protagonists "American teenagers" and Kaz interjects that he is Canadian.
- Would Hurt a Child:
- In the flashbacks, Captain Blade is willing to strike or whip the thirteen-year-old Samuel at the slightest provocation and also is willing to murder young Spanish prisoners. One of his men, York, also backhands Samuel for questioning Blade in one scene, although this is portrayed as a Cruel to Be Kind moment that keeps Blade from expressing his displeasure himself by whipping Samuel.
- Before going to sea, Samuel is kidnapped by a chimney sweep who sends dozens of kids up chimneys as slave laborers and is shocked when Samuel actually survives long enough to get too big to fit into chimneys anymore.
- Marina is willing to endanger the four teenaged interns over the treasure.
- A Taste of the Lash: Blade carries a whip everywhere with him and loves using it on his crewmen at the slightest excuse.
- Threatening Shark: Zigzagged. When Kaz sees a shark on his first dive, he panics, stabs it, and is promptly rebuked for doing so, with Captain Vanover lambasting Jaws for creating a negative stereotype of animals who will swim past divers without a moment of aggression unless there's already blood in the water. However, whenever there is blood in the water, an eighteen-foot tiger shark nicknamed Clarence is willing to hungrily lunge at the heroes while displaying a wide maw of teeth.
