On August 7, 1979, Richard Walker was in one of his melancholy moods. Married and the father of a 15 month-old daughter, he was thousands of miles away inside a saturation chamber on board a diving ship called the Wildrake in the middle of the North Sea. Lying on his bunk just before his next dive he began a note in his diary:

Soon after writing in his diary, Richard and his partner, Skip Guiel, climbed into the Wildrake bell on a routine dive to 524 feet for British National Oil Corporation. Within a matter of hours they were fighting for their lives on the bottom of the sea.

In the genre of Into Thin Air and In the Heart of the Sea, Into the Lion's Mouth is the true story of the most notorious "lost bell" diving accident in North Sea history. It covers Walker and Guiel's entry into the little-known world of saturation diving, how they came to be trapped on the bottom of the sea, the dramatic rescue bid to save their lives, why it failed, and the nearly decade-long struggle by the relatives to achieve justice for their deaths.

Written by former deep-sea diver Michael Smart, this book is the culmination of eight years of research to solve the haunting mystery behind the dual fatality and the discovery that it was not a "pure" accident, but that a cascade of failures and criminal negligence were responsible for one of the most awful scenarios ever imagined.