“Metanoia Cave” by Ken Adams

Metanoia Cave

Ken Adams
Outskirts Press (2025)
ISBN: 978-1977282217
Reviewed by Justin Gaynor for Reader Views (01/2026)

One of the great traditions in storytelling is the search for lost treasure.  As Metanoia Cave starts to unfold, we all but expect a treasure map with an ‘X’ to turn up.   But author Ken Adams defies our expectations – not once, but over and over in this exciting and unpredictable story.

Adams is a skilled storyteller, mixing humor, tension, and genuine affection for the characters to take turns pulling us through the story.  I was already grinning on the first two pages when a list of work emails turned up.   It’s clear that Adams has served his time in Corporate America (Your Password is About to Expire….You have 16 overdue Success Factor learnings…).   He is also extremely knowledgeable about the natural world. 

Before I continue with the writing style, though, let’s get the basics of the story out of the way:

1. Rich, handsome playboy vs. genuine, smart, and kind girlfriend
2. Buried treasure.  In this case, buried on the bottom of the sea in the South Atlantic…
3. …which allows for the Race Against Time, as inevitably some key characters find themselves underwater with a limited supply of oxygen
4. Greedy adventure junkies vs. curious scientists

We’re off to a great start when we begin to distinguish the scientific crew and their goals from the “graduates of Facebook University,” a bunch of know-nothings who are nonetheless well known due to their skill in making noise.  Luckily for the reader, most of the story takes place in attractive locations like Belize and Tristan de Cunha, a remote, unspoiled island in the South Atlantic.

You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place…like you’ll not only miss the people you love, but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and place, because you’ll never be this way again. (Quoted by the book’s author from Azar Nafizi)

If we had any doubts where our author’s sympathies lie, they disappear quickly through the innovative use of short inter-chapters in which interesting and little-known biological facts are disclosed.  We learn about ventilation in prairie dog towns, about how mushrooms communicate with one another, about extinct 8000-pound sloths who dug large tunnels thousands of feet long, which eventually became human habitations.   I didn’t count these little asides, but there must be a couple of dozen of them, all of them interesting and, crucially, all somehow connected to the story we’re reading.   This is a storytelling technique I have never encountered before, and I credit Adams with creating a truly innovative technique.

An aside:   Don’t be afraid to use the library or the internet while reading this. The lost treasure, for example, actually exists, and the real story may be as interesting as the one I just read.  It’s also worth looking up the definition of ‘metanoia’ if you’re unfamiliar with it.  No, I’m not going to tell you!

I’m not going to tell you what happened in the book, either.  Many of the characters who learned the truth ended up dead, and I would hate for that fate to befall this review’s readers. What I can say is that humans are capable of great compassion and great cruelty, and both are well illustrated here.  Ken Adams’ Metanoia Cave is one wild adventure, but given the well-chosen sprinkling of information Adams provides us with, it is also, from a scientific perspective, not impossible.  But what it really is, is a whole lot of fun to read.