NUMA Series/YMMV


 * Mary Sue: Name a protagonist or major good guy. Now try to name a single time they genuinely put a foot wrong or made a bad decision. To Cussler's credit, Rule of Cool makes this somewhat forgivable, but...
 * Dirk Pitt himself does have a couple of exceptions: in Iceberg, after, Pitt spends a good portion of the rest of the book angsting about whether he did something wrong. There's also his failure to in Shock Wave.