Review with Spoilers for The Chamber by Will Dean

Arts Tribune


My Review With Spoilers for The Chamber by Will Dean discusses how I (mostly) enjoyed the author’s prior book, The Last One, a thriller set on an ocean liner. So I decided to try The Chamber, which turned out to be a chilling locked room mystery with a VERY unusual setting. What did I think? Will you like it? Let’s discuss!

Review with Spoilers for The Chamber by Will Dean. The book's cover, which shows a hand pressed against a porthole, against a dark blue background.

The Chamber by Will Dean: Overview

  • Published in the US on August 6, 2024 by Atria/Emily Bestler
  • Thanks to the publisher for the advance review copy
  • 352 pages
  • Also by this author: The Last Thing to Burn, First Born, The Last One, and a series of Swedish Noir mysteries

The Chamber by Will Dean: Jen’s Quick Take

  • To me, The Chamber had a very different feel than The Last One (link to my spoiler review)
  • One of the more unique Locked Room Mysteries I’ve read
  • The Chamber included a lot of scientific/technical explanations of saturation diving, something I was completely unfamiliar with and would NEVER NEVER do.
  • Also a VERY unusual and extremely claustrophobic setting
  • I felt this extreme version of a locked room mystery did limit the character development and the mystery plot in ways I’ll explain below!
  • But try this if you love a locked room mystery and want a unique spin on the concept

Review of The Chamber by Will Dean

If you love a Locked Room Mystery, The Chamber has one of the more unusual locked room settings I have seen.

Six people set off on a month-long work mission. They are saturation “sat” divers whose job is to maintain oil pipelines located in the depths of the North Sea, off the eastern coast of Scotland.

To do this maintenance work, a group of divers is locked in a small hyperbaric saturation chamber and sent to the bottom of the sea. From there, they will take turns going in pairs on day-long work assignments in a diving bell. All their needs (like food, vitamins, and supplies) are provided by a fully staffed DSV (dive support vessel).

Seriously, the information in that paragraph would have been hard for me to piece together by just reading the book. I found this article helpful and this field needs to be a Discovery Channel series, because WHAT EVEN? People really do this job and I am in awe.

So, where’s the mystery? One by one, the sat divers on a work trip start dying. The chamber is a dangerous place, where germs and bacteria can spread like wildfire and one wrong move can spell disaster. But this seems different. Why are the divers dying? Accident, or murder?

The strength of The Chamber to me was its unusual setting

I’m claustrophobic and found reading this book almost unbearable. Like being buried alive. For hours.

For me, the negatives of The Chamber were several:

Given the length of the book and all the explanation of the setting that was needed, there was not much time for character development.

Because of the book’s unusual setting, the story required a large amount of info-dumping.

To me, the ending that felt a little unsatisfying. The suspense in the book was greater than any sense of mystery, if that makes sense. I’ll explain more in the spoiler section below.

If you are looking for something completely different in the locked room lane, give The Chamber a try.

Spoilers for the Chamber by Will Dean

To protect readers who HATE being spoiled you will need to log in with your email or social media account. By doing so, you will be added to my email list and receive awesome weekly updates about new books! For more information on why I protect my spoilers, please read this post! If you are having any issues PLEASE leave a comment as I want to help!

As described above, I think the 350 page length of The Chamber plus the enormous amount of world-building needed left very little time for character development or clues.

  • The book flirted with the idea that one of the outside characters on the DSV could have been responsible for the murders, but since we never really see much these outside characters, that didn’t seem very likely to me.
  • A typical “And Then There Were None” twist is that one of the “dead” people isn’t really dead, but the murderer who is pretending to be. But again, the setting of the book made this impossible. The remaining divers are asked to perform autopsies on the dead ones. (I KNOW!!)
  • By the end, the suspects came down to André or Ellen, the narrator. I did consider the possibility that Ellen was an unreliable narrator AND the killer. But she was not.

The killer was André.

The book offers little to NO explanation as to why André killed four people. How did he do it? He hid cyanide capsules in the rims and arms of his reading glasses, then poisoned his colleagues one by one.

Ellen is left as stumped as we are. She says she “will never understand what possessed [André] to do what he did.” Okay, then. Just like in The Last One, Will Dean is leaving us with more questions than answers.

We do learn that André had a gambling problem and some marital problems. But the motive was WEAK for killing all your co-workers one by one.

The Chamber did have another somewhat surprising twist, which was that even though we thought Ellen had said good-bye to her husband and children to do this assignment, her husband and children were dead, killed in a tragic drunk driving accident. Just like this book! (I’m not typing the name because that reveal is a spoiler but the book came out about 8 years ago, so you have probably read it.)

If you’ve read The Chamber, I’d love to know what you think! Please leave your questions in the comments! And tell me what your worst phobia is!!



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