Dee Henderson. Undetected. Bethany House, 2014.

Undetected is really two stories. First, and foremost to this reader, there is the story about submarines and research on underwater navigation. Second, there is a stock romance.

Let us take care of the romance first. I tell my male students when we read Jane Eyre that that book contains the seeds of the plots of most romance novels written today. So in Undetected, Gina Gray is being courted by two sailors, St. John Rivers and Edward Rochester; oh, sorry, I mean Daniel Field and Mark Bishop.

Gina, though, is no Jane Eyre. She is reluctant to speak her mind and afraid of being hurt. She is also a genius. I recall once hearing an interview with a successful movie actress who married an actor considerably older. She said simply that the guys her age had neither the money nor the experience she had as a matinee idol. She could relate much better to the older and more experienced actor. The narrator hints that is the kind of man Gina needs.

Gina graduated from high school at fourteen, got her first Ph.D. at twenty-one and developed a sophisticated sonar system for submarine navigation and safety. The cross-sonar system—something like it actually exists—is more accurate because it uses sonar from at least two points to triangulate. She was curious about it because her older brother, Jeff, is a submariner, and she thought that it might help make his job safer.

Gina is now 28 or 29, and brother Jeff is the Commanding Officer of a fast attack submarine. Commander Mark Bishop is the Commanding Officer of a ballistic missile submarine. Jeff tries to fix Gina up first with Bishop, who is about twelve years older than Gina and a widower. He demurs, so Jeff has her meet one of the younger men on his crew, Daniel Field. The one perhaps factual flaw in this story is that Daniel is described as a sonarman but also as a Naval Academy graduate. Sonarman is an enlisted rate. An academy graduate might be a sonar specialist, but he would have an officer rank.

Much of the story, then, tells of Gina working out her relationships. Since the cover has the picture of a higher ranking naval officer—he has the gold braid or “scrambled eggs” on the visor of his cap—we can guess which guy she will end up with.

The cool part, though, is the imagined (or maybe classified) technology. Hunt for Red October appealed to its “technodude” readers partly because the submarine Red October had a unique tractor-type propulsion system. Theoretically, it might have been quieter than propellers. I am not sure anything like it was ever tried, but it was an interesting idea. So is the cross-sonar, and so is Gina’s latest experiment.

What if it were possible to “ping” a vessel without being detected? This idea sounds like it might work. Simply passively record and ambient sound (waves, ice, underwater rock slides, a whale) and use that sound to ping, that is, to bounce a sound wave off a vessel. It would likely be dismissed as part of the natural surroundings by any vessel that happened to hear it.

So Cdr. Bishop and Mr. Field become involved in some of those experiments, which seem to work very well. Once the Secretary of the Navy understands what has been accomplished, Gina gets a permanent personal security detail. Can’t have other countries find out about this very interesting stuff. The detail does put some limits on her personal life.

Gina also contributes to a team that is using satellites to come up with a more accurate map of the sea floors of all the oceans.

There is one chapter that is worth reading even if the reader were to pass over the rest of the story. Chapter seven is a conversation between Gina and Bishop which at its core is about the concept of a just war. Gina got interested in underwater acoustics because her big brother was a submariner. But what if her research just made it easier to kill people? That begins to bother her. The discussion really boils down to the whole question of good and evil.

“People can misuse what God created. But that has everything to do with man’s free will and tendency to evil, not science. What God created is good. So do what you were created to do. Break new scientific ground. Help us understand the dynamics of what God created.

“You can’t protect the world from itself, Gina. You can only give good men the tools necessary to do their jobs…” (148, cf. Genesis 1:31)

At any rate, Gina has decided that she has done enough marine acoustics work and wants to get into something else. She has standing job offers from NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She thinks that getting into astronomy or astrophysics would be a change of pace—except that she makes a connection between a solar flare she has recorded data on and how that information can be used to passively detect submarines. Henderson makes the science sound reasonable, just as Clancy did with Red October.

While I did have a question about the sonarman, otherwise, Henderson described life aboard a nuclear submarine and on a sub base pretty accurately. As someone who lived on a sub base for two years and worked with submariners and sub hunters, I can vouch for that.

Besides the intriguing technology, excitement comes for Commander Bishop’s crew as somebody in the Eastern Pacific apparently shoots a torpedo at Jeff Gray’s boat at the same time North Korea launches a missile and China is threatening to take over some uninhabited islands claimed by Japan. China also alleges that someone may have deliberately sunk one of its submarines. Suddenly, on orders from the President, Bishop’s boat prepares to fire some intercontinental ballistic missiles as soon as Washington gives them the word.

It reminds us that in the real world, many submariners have witnessed geopolitical events that the rest of the world has no knowledge of.

In all fairness to the romance aspect, all the main characters—Gina, Daniel, Mark, and Jeff—act like mature adults who really have the interests of others foremost. There are also some kittens and a puppy to add some cuteness. But the submarine story is the selling point to this veteran.